On the other hand, a true Inner Ring (as Lewis described it) is held together exclusively by a desire for power rather than by friendship; and it was this which chiefly distinguished the Inklings from such power-groups, for friendship was the foundation upon which the group rested.
Strong male friendships were an inevitable characteristic of Oxford, a university that had been chiefly celibate until the late nineteenth century. In Lewis’s era it was still customary for dons (even married dons) to spend a large part of their spare time in each other’s company. All the same, Lewis paid far more attention than did his contemporaries to the actual notion of male friendship. From quite early in his life he had strong views on the subject. He believed that full intimacy with another man could only be achieved if women were completely excluded. ‘A friend dead is to be mourned: a friend married is to be guarded against, both being equally lost,’ he wrote in his diary in 1922. He also felt that it was not the done thing for male friends to discuss their domestic or personal problems. ‘I speak of my own affairs with some difficulty,’ he wrote to Barfield during their ‘Great War’ controversy, ‘and don’t think it conduces to the right sort of intimacy (male intimacy) to do so v. often.’
These were not just chance remarks. Each of them reflects very closely the sort of person he was. First of all, his statement that ‘a friend married is to be guarded against’ was part of his whole attitude to women, for he was firmly convinced from an early age that the female psychology was entirely different from – and largely inimical to – that of the male. In 1923 he and Barfield discussed the subject and agreed that ‘either men or women are mad’ – not that they themselves had any doubt as to which sex was sane. More seriously, he was well aware of the Greek doctrine that Form is masculine and Matter feminine, which he quoted with apparent approval; and after his conversion he adapted that doctrine into a Christian framework when he declared that the relationship of the created to the Creator is that of ‘female to male’. Given this belief, it was inevitable that he should have strong views on the subject of marriage. He declared that ‘Christian law’ (as he put it) bestowed a necessity of ‘headship’ on the husband, and from biblical sources he deduced that ‘the husband is the head of the wife just so far as he is to her what Christ is to the Church’, adding: ‘If there must be a head, why the man? Well, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman?’ And elsewhere: ‘Do you really want a matriarchal world? Do you really like women in authority? When you seek authority yourself, do you naturally seek it in a woman?’ One might note that in Lewis’s Perelandra the Eve and Adam are referred to respectively as ‘The Lady’ and ‘The King’.
It would be wrong to say that he despised women. He was no misogynist. But he did regard the female mind as inferior to the male, or at least as being incapable of the mental activities which he valued. He told Charles Williams that he thought women’s minds ‘not really meant for logic or great art’, and he once wrote an uncharacteristically cruel short story called ‘The Shoddy Lands’ in which he is allowed, for a few moments, to see the world as it is seen through the eyes of what he clearly regards as a typically selfish and vain woman. What he did wish to find in women was clearly expressed in the characters of the Lady in Perelandra and Mrs Dimble in That Hideous Strength: intelligence certainly, but submissiveness to the male, and great motherliness. Not merely motherliness, moreoever, but fertility: one of Jane Studdock’s sins in That Hideous Strength is her refusal to bear children.
To some extent these attitudes were typical of his social background, and of Oxford in particular. Until the reforms of the eighteen-seventies, holders of college fellowships were in general not allowed to marry and, though by Lewis’s day marriage was common among dons, it had not been fully integrated into university life. Dons worked in their colleges and took a large proportion of their meals there. Their college was almost invariably the centre of their social life. In the meantime their wives were obliged to remain at home in the suburbs, superintending the servants and bringing up the children. Added to this was the fact that some of the wives were far less well educated than their husbands,1 so that even when they were given a chance to talk to those male friends of their husband who came to the house they had very little to say, or at least very little that the men thought worth listening to. ‘The men have learned to live among ideas,’ wrote Lewis when he was discussing this very problem. ‘They know what discussion, proof and illustration mean. A woman who has had merely school lessons and has abandoned soon after marriage whatever tinge of “culture” they gave her – whose reading is the Women’s Magazines and whose general conversation is almost wholly narrative – cannot really enter such a circle [of male friends]. If the men are ruthless, she sits bored and silent through a conversation which means nothing to her. If they are better bred, of course, they try to bring her in. Things are explained to her: people try to sublimate her irrelevant and blundering observations into some kind of sense. But the efforts soon fail and, for manners’ sake, what might have been a real discussion is deliberately diluted and peters out in gossip, anecdotes and jokes.’ Cruel, but true of at least some women at Oxford in the years between the wars; though of course the very fact that Lewis and his contemporaries had this poor opinion of female conversation itself prevented such women from being given any conversational chances. It was a vicious circle. Moreoever many women found Lewis as unbearable as he found them. If they had no ‘real conversation’, he had no small talk whatever, and they often felt that he was blundering, brusque, or downright rude.
In this respect, then, he was merely typical of his contemporaries. But it should be remembered that his own experience was worse than most people’s. He was unmarried, but there was Mrs Moore, and even by Oxford standards her conversation was ruthlessly illogical. Her mind, as Warnie Lewis once remarked, was ‘just the sort of mind Jack could not tolerate. I was dining alone with her one evening, and the meal opened with the following exchange:
Myself:
I see this is the coldest winter since 18——.
Mrs Moore:
No. It was much colder the year my grandfather died.
Myself:
Oh I’m not quoting from one of those chatty newspaper articles about the weather, but from the official statistics.
Mrs Moore:
Then the man who wrote them was a fool. It was much colder the year my grandfather died.
Mrs Moore’s company cannot have improved Lewis’s opinion of the female mind. His involvement with her perhaps also goes some way towards explaining his almost aggressive refusal to discuss deeply personal matters with his men friends. In the nineteen-twenties his private life had been a mystery to his friends, and he had refused to explain his feelings for Mrs Moore even to Warnie. During the thirties she became more and more demanding, and by the time war broke out she had grown into a tyrannical and perhaps not entirely sane old woman. Lewis continued to behave towards her with infinite and unfailing charity, scarcely ever complaining about her even to Warnie, let alone to anyone else. So why should he encourage other people to complain about their domestic difficulties or discuss their problems? Lewis’s friends sometimes found this attitude tiresome. It annoyed Tolkien, who often wanted to find a sympathetic ear for the tale of his domestic troubles.
But despite this attitude to women and this desire to avoid talking about personal things, Lewis did not enter into male friendship in a manner that could be described as hearty or boorish. He was capable also of great delicacy and sensitivity, perhaps even feminine sensitivity. He once said: ‘I can’t bear “a man’s man” or “a woman’s woman”. There ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man.’ Indeed it might be said that the femininity in him contributed to the friendships of the Inklings.
This is not to say that he was homosexual. He does not appear ever to have felt any overt sexual attraction towards other men, and he said of this, ‘How a man can feel anything but bewildering pity for t
he genuinely homosexual I’ve never been able to understand.’ In The Four Loves he argued forcibly that it is ridiculous to suppose all male friendships to be founded on sexual attraction. On the other hand he was disturbed by homosexuality: the considerable space which he devotes to it in his account of school life in his autobiography shows as much. Perhaps (as has been suggested) one can also see in his shabby manner of dress – baggy trousers, old mackintosh, squashed hat – a wish to differentiate himself from the homosexual-dandy fashions of Oxford in the late twenties and early thirties.
Yet for somebody who did not experience overt homosexual feelings, and perhaps even feared them, Lewis was prepared to admit a considerable element of something like the erotic into his notions of friendship between man and man. In The Allegory of Love he discusses the nature of male friendship in early medieval society, this being an era when (as he believed) romantic heterosexual love played a negligible part in life as well as literature. ‘The deepest of worldly emotions in this period’, he declares, ‘is the love of man for man, the mutual love of warriors who die together fighting against odds, and the affection between vassal and lord.’ This last emotion he compared to ‘a small boy’s feeling for some hero in the sixth form’, while he said of the friendships between warrior and warrior that they ‘were themselves lover-like; in their intensity, their wilful exclusion of other values, and their uncertainty’. Whether or not this is a true picture of early medieval society, it has some resemblance to Lewis’s own life. A king’s man may or may not have regarded his feudal lord in the fashion of small boy looking up to an eighteen-year-old, but this was rather the way in which Lewis behaved towards Charles Williams. The feelings of one medieval fighting man for another may or may not have been ‘lover-like in their intensity’, but there was certainly a trace of this in the way that Lewis felt about his own men friends. And when towards the end of his life he wrote an essay on the topic of Friendship, he reverted to the image of warriors in an earlier society when trying to explain the history of male friendship. ‘Long before history began we men have got together and done things,’ he wrote. ‘We enjoyed one another’s society greatly; we Braves, we hunters, all bound together by shared skill, shared dangers and hardships, esoteric jokes — away from the women and children.’ There is something absurd in his trying to explain his feelings for his friends in this way, and several of the Inklings actually thought the whole essay (in The Four Loves) was ill judged. Yet the very fact that Lewis had to resort to such far fetched comparisons suggests how intangible and inexplicable his feelings were.
Despite the exaggeration of some of the essay, it should be studied closely by anyone who wants to come near an understanding of the nature of the Inklings. There is much in it which relates closely to Lewis’s life. His account of how true Friendship begins when two acquaintances discover that they have some common insight or taste inevitably recalls his and Tolkien’s discovery of their mutual delight in ‘Northernness’. His assertion that friendship thrives not so much on agreeing about the answers as on agreeing what are the important questions reminds one of the way in which he and Barfield continued on close terms long after they had disagreed on fundamental religious issues. His assertion that Friendship is not inquisitive – ‘You become a man’s Friend without knowing or caring whether he is married or single or how he earns his living’ – is a statement of his own obstinate refusal to admit private matters into conversation with his friends. And his declaration that real friendship is not jealous, and that ‘in each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out’, perhaps comes closest of all to explaining what the Inklings were fundamentally about. It comes closest, but it does not finally get there; and all attempts to analyse the nature of Lewis’s feelings for his friends will ultimately come to nothing because these things cannot be explained. They can only be observed.
*
Friendship with other men played as important a part in Tolkien’s life as it did in Lewis’s. Unlike Lewis, Tolkien encountered romantic love at an early age, for when he was sixteen he fell in love with a girl of nineteen, a fellow orphan who lived in his Birmingham lodging house. But he and Edith Bratt were soon separated by his guardian, and in late adolescence Tolkien was thrown back on friendship with others of his own sex, so much so that by the time he was reunited with her he had, as it were, lost touch with her, and had devoted the greater part of his deepest affections to his male friends. He and Edith were eventually married and had four children, but family affairs (though of great interest and importance to Tolkien) seemed to him to be quite apart from his life with his male friends. This division of his life into watertight compartments inevitably caused a strain, and Edith Tolkien resented the fact that such a large part of her husband’s affections were lavished on Lewis and other men friends, while Tolkien himself felt that time spent with the Inklings and in other male company could only be gained by a deliberate and almost ruthless exclusion of attention to his wife. ‘There are many things that a man feels are legitimate even though they cause a fuss,’ he wrote to a son who was about to be married. ‘Let him not lie about them to his wife or lover! Cut them out – or if worth a fight: just insist. Such matters may arise frequently – the glass of beer, the pipe, the non writing of letters, the other friend, etc. etc. If the other side’s claims really are unreasonable (as they are at times between the dearest lovers and most loving married folk) they are much better met by above board refusal and “fuss” than subterfuge.’ Edith Tolkien was capable of responding to this attitude with equal obstinacy, and as a result the atmosphere in the Tolkien household at Northmoor Road was sometimes as difficult as that in the Lewis-Moore ménage at the Kilns.
It might be imagined that Tolkien adopted this attitude and divided his life in this fashion because, like Lewis, he regarded the female intellect as largely inferior to the male. Certainly he was quite capable of expressing such an opinion. In 1941 he wrote: ‘How quickly an intelligent woman can be taught, grasp the teacher’s ideas, see his point – and how (with some exceptions) they can go no further, when they leave his hand, or when they cease to take a personal interest in him. It is their gift to be receptive, stimulated, fertilized (in many other matters than the physical) by the male.’ Yet Tolkien was not at all condescending to his many women pupils, and he helped several of them to achieve considerable academic distinction. Moreover, while he was capable of agreeing with the kind of view about female minds which Lewis held, he was also quite capable of sympathising with the plight of a clever woman who had been trapped by marriage into leading an intellectually empty life.
If the Inklings were for Lewis the culmination of patterns in his earlier life, there were precedents in Tolkien’s earlier years too. At school he was one of a group of four friends who called themselves ‘The Tea Club and Barrovian Society’ (the latter after Barrow’s Stores in Birmingham where they met for tea) and who read and criticised each other’s writing much as the Inklings did many years later. The affections of the members of the ‘T.C.B.S.’ for each other were very strong, and Tolkien was profoundly distressed when two of them were killed in the Battle of the Somme. Like Lewis, he too had his ‘set’ of undergraduate friends at Oxford. Like Lewis he enjoyed the challenge of faction-fighting in the English School, and of forming a junto to achieve the syllabus reforms. But while Lewis felt that all his friendships were equally important in their way – Lewis cared as much for Barfield as for Williams, as much for Williams as for Tolkien – Tolkien was more selective with his affections.
This is not to say that he was not fond of many of the Inklings. He had much affection and respect for Warnie Lewis, whom he actually considered to be unfairly overshadowed by Jack. He was deeply fond of Havard, whose company he greatly valued especially in his later years, when Havard was a neighbour and a close confidant. The friendship of Barfield, Williams, Dyson, and the others played a large part in his life. But his affection for Jack Lewis was more profound; his feelings for
the other Inklings never equalled it.
*
Warnie Lewis took friendships very much for granted. In his army days he had been obliged to spend most of his time with other men, and his Oxford life was merely a continuation of this. Above this there stood out one stronger emotion: his love for his brother, which was the emotional centre of his life. When one day Jack mentioned the question of what might happen if he were to predecease his brother, Warnie wrote in his diary that this was ‘a subject which does not bear thinking about, for I dare not contemplate a life which does not centre round J.’ For more than thirty years Warnie’s life did indeed centre round Jack, and the Inklings were to him only an accidental result (though a valuable one) of this central attachment.
As to his brother’s and Tolkien’s attitude to women, Warnie Lewis to some extent shared this in that he had little enthusiasm for female company in general. But this was not because he had a contempt for the female intellect – his regard for his own mind was so modest as to rule out any such attitude – as because he was, by his own admission, very ill at ease in the company of women. He wrote in his diary in 1946: ‘With all my army experience I am still as shy of women as a hobbledehoy.’
*
With Charles Williams there was, as always, a complexity of views. Williams was certainly aware (with Lewis) of masculine friendship as a specifically identifiable emotion. He also believed (with Tolkien) that it involved very different emotions than did marriage. On the other hand he did not think, as Tolkien did, that the two were largely incompatible. In his novel All Hallows’ Eve, a book that he wrote after he had been among the Inklings for several years, he talked of the importance of ‘the tide of masculine friendship’. Yet he went on to declare that (for the character in the novel called Richard Furnival) this tide had always ‘swelled against the high cliff’ of marriage: ‘He had not lost at all the sense of great Leviathans, disputes and laughter, things native and natural to the male, but beyond them, and shining towards them had been that other less natural, and as it were more archangelic figure, the shape of the woman and his wife.’
The Inklings Page 22