The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  Another variation in the Inklings’ routine was caused by the frequent arrival, between 1947 and 1950, of lavish food parcels from one of Lewis’s American admirers, Dr Warfield M. Firor of Maryland. As post-war food rationing was making life almost more drab than it had been during the war itself, these parcels were most welcome, and they invariably included something that could scarcely be bought in England then, a large ham. In consequence, ‘ham suppers’ in a private dining-room at Magdalen became quite a frequent event for the Inklings, with Colin Hardie as carver, neither of the Lewis brothers being able to wield a carving knife with any skill. ‘We sat down eight to dinner,’ Warnie wrote on the first occasion, ‘all in the highest spirits: J. and Colin at top and bottom respectively, Tollers, Humphrey and Christopher on one side, Hugo, David, and I on the other.’ After dinner they adjourned to Lewis’s rooms. An American admirer had sent Lewis a tuxedo, and this was raffled, it being far too narrowly cut for Lewis. Warnie recorded: ‘Proceedings opened with the great Tuxedo raffle – for an American dinner jacket suit, won by Colin, whom it didn’t fit, and who with great generosity waived his claim in favour of Christopher, who looked admirable in it.’ Some months later, after a number of further hams had been consumed with due ceremony, Lewis wrote to the donor Dr Firor: ‘To all my set you are by now an almost mythical figure – Firor-of-the-Hams, a sort of Fertility god.’ There were of course other things in Dr Firor’s parcels besides hams, and indeed there were other parcels from other admirers. Lewis gave a good many of the contents to the Inklings and, as John Wain recalled, his method of distribution was to scatter the tins and packets on his bed, cover them with the bedspread, and allow each of them to pick one of the unidentifiable humps. Wain said: ‘It was no use simply choosing the biggest, which might turn out to be prunes or something equally dreary.’

  *

  On several occasions after the war the Lewis brothers took one of their fellow Inklings on holiday with them. In August 1946 Tolkien accompanied them to Malvern, where (despite Jack Lewis’s unhappy schooldays there) they often took holidays. This was partly because Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen was now married to a member of the Malvern College teaching staff, and they could simply exchange houses with her and her husband, Maureen going to Oxford to look after her mother. But the Malvern countryside itself was an attraction, and Lewis’s former pupil George Sayer who taught at the College was much liked by both brothers. Tolkien reported of this 1947 holiday:

  ‘Only one really good inn, The Unicorn, which is all that you could desire in looks and otherwise. The Herefordshire cider is astringent and thirst quenching. The great brethren are in good form and not too energetic. Warnie’s attempts to control his irascibility and do all the work so as to give Jack a rest are quite touching – and also very efficient. We are living well and economically.’

  Despite Tolkien’s dislike of the Lewis brothers’ ‘ruthless’ speed of walking, ‘we managed two good days with him,’ Warnie wrote in his diary, ‘including one to the top of the Camp, where I was more than ever impressed with the beauty of the northward view. Our nice bar lady has left the Camp, and been replaced by a sulky Glaswegian with a patch of plaster on his forehead, who was truculent at our disapproval of his abominable beer: as Tollers said after the encounter, it was easy to see how he came by his patch! Much more enjoyable was our morning draught at the Wych, where they keep Sprackley’s Ale, a beer still brewed by one of the old fashioned family concerns, now alas almost all gone. From time to time I contrasted this holiday with the Hugo one, and was struck with the diversity of taste and interest we have in the Inklings: particularly when Tollers stopped one day and gave us a talk on the formation of the Spanish chestnut at the identical spot which prompted Hugo to tell us of the scandalous circumstances under which the late Earl Beauchamp was ordered out of England by George V. Tollers left us on Saturday. His visit added a private piece of nomenclature to Malvern – the christening of the mysterious and ornate little green and silver door in the walls of the old cab rank in Pring Road as “Sackville-Baggins’s”.’

  The Malvern holiday with Hugo Dyson was not recorded in Warnie Lewis’s diary, but he did keep a note of the trip that he, Jack, and Dyson made to Liverpool in the spring of 1946. Jack had to make the journey so as to take part in a Brains Trust, and this was extended into a short holiday.

  On the train journey from Oxford, Warnie recorded that ‘Hugo and I behaved over engines like a couple of school boys. He had brought nothing to read with him, but this we sternly corrected at a later period. From Bletchley to Rugby we had a crowded corridor train, and reached the latter in time for a cup of tea: here we lost Hugo, who, as J. said, should always have a collar and lead when one travels with him. Hugo behaved heroically after dark, singing and telling stories: “If I stopped I should become hysterical” he said.’ They slept at Birkenhead, and next evening Warnie noted: ‘I was the unhappy and inadvertent cause of launching an argument on the difference between Art and Philosophy; towards the end of the first hour J. and Hugo discovered that they were talking about different subjects. Each side then restated its war aims, and then set to again. When or how the argument ended I don’t know, for it was still going strong when I went to bed at eleven.’

  The next day: ‘Hugo has developed a passion for ferry voyaging, which is indeed the best diversion this place affords, so nothing loathe we all set out after breakfast to Liverpool, and from there took the other ferry to Wallasey. After lunch Hugo, who has become a ferry addict, went for another voyage, and I, after a siesta, went for a more extended stroll in Birkenhead than I have yet had in it; it is exactly Hell as described by J. in the opening chapter of The Great Divorce. How can any government expect content from the inhabitants of such a place?’ In the evening Lewis went to his Brains Trust, and Hugo and Warnie explored Liverpool. ‘Our evening began badly by finding the theatrical pub so crowded that there was no prospect of a drink there, and mercurial Hugo decided that there was nothing for it but to go straight home. However, on the way down to Pier Head, we saw a still blacked out pub called the “Angel”, which proved to be comfortable and nearly empty, and there we rapidly revived under the stimulus of bottled Guinness, and had much talk about army life. Hugo, who was by now completely restored to his best spirits, suggested another voyage to Wallasey, and I was nothing loathe, so off we went. We found J. in the lounge when we got home, and a conversation started on the wit of the seventeenth century. Hugo quoted an epigram of Suckling’s on the birth of Nell Gwyn which was the most disgusting thing of the sort I have ever heard.’

  *

  The Inklings’ ham suppers continued until late in 1949, by which time food supplies in England had returned to something like normal. At the last ham supper, Warnie Lewis recorded that Hugo Dyson ‘bellows uninterruptedly for about three minutes, and as he shows no sign of stopping, two guests at the bottom of the table begin a conversation: which being observed by Hugo, he raises his hand and shouts reproachfully – “Friends, friends, I feel it would be better if we keep the conversation general.”’

  Dyson was now, at least in theory, able to attend the Inklings more frequently, for in 1945 he was elected a Fellow of Merton College, and he and his wife left Reading University where they had been for twenty-two years and came to live in Oxford, taking a house just round the corner from Magdalen. In practice however he still only put in comparatively rare appearances on Thursdays. ‘This evening Hugo carried me to dine with him in Merton,’ Warnie wrote in his diary in August 1946. ‘He was in high spirits when I met him, and his spirits rose steadily for the rest of the evening. I was more than ever struck with his amazing knowledge of Shakespeare; I don’t suppose there is a man in Oxford – with the possible exception of Onions – who can quote so happily, e.g. tonight, apropos of J. – “O cursed spite that gave thee to the Moor”: poor J.’s whole catastrophe epitomized in nine words! I saw tonight why Hugo rarely gets to an Inkling; every one he meets after dinner he engages in earnest conversation,
and tonight, even with steady pressure from me, it took him forty minutes to get from Hall to the gate.’ And on another occasion, when the Inklings were meeting not in Magdalen but (as they sometimes did during this period) in Tolkien’s rooms in Merton – Tolkien also being a Fellow of that college since 1945 when he became Professor of English Language and Literature: ‘When I arrived Hugo’s voice’ (noted Warnie) ‘was booming through the fog in the Quad, inviting a party of undergraduates up to his rooms; he really can be very irritating at times.’

  Dyson was certainly ‘irritating at times’ to the Tolkiens, both father and son; for his impatience with The Lord of the Rings (and indeed with all Thursday night readings, as opposed to conversation) had been voiced so often that eventually he was allowed a veto. ‘A well attended Inkling this evening,’ Warnie wrote in April 1947; ‘both the Tolkiens, J. and I, Humphrey, Jervase [sic], Hugo; the latter came in just as we were starting on the Hobbit, and as he now exercises a veto on it – most unfairly I think – we had to stop.’

  Inevitably, Dyson’s pupils at Merton either loved him or found him unbearable. One of the latter was P. J. Kavanagh, who in 1951 came back wounded from Korea, and misunderstood his tutor’s manner from the start. ‘We took you from the trenches! The trenches!’ Hugo Dyson chortled at him, and Kavanagh shrank back, later revenging himself by a rather cruel cameo of Dyson in his autobiography. What Kavanagh failed to appreciate was that though Dyson used his wit like a broad-sword, roaring his jokes across the room in sheer exuberance, that wit was itself rapier-keen.

  Long before, Lewis had described Dyson as ‘a burly man, both in mind and body, with the stamp of the war upon him’. By the time Dyson had taught for a few years at Merton he was no longer burly. Arthritis had its grip on him, and he walked lamely, with a silver-topped stick. ‘He could sometimes seem as he perched on his chair almost birdlike,’ recalled one of his pupils, Stephen Medcalf. ‘But he still had the thrust and apparent mass of burliness, and I never rid myself of the feeling that the arthritic lameness was really a wound from the ’14–18 war. “I’m Hugo Dyson,” he introduced himself, “I’m a bore”; and once at dinner when the menu announced Roast Duck and the scouts brought Roast Lamb, “Le Malade Imaginaire”, he said.’

  Dyson published virtually nothing, and what there is of his in print – Augustans and Romantics, an article on Wordsworth, an introduction to Pope, a British Academy lecture on Shakespeare – captures almost nothing of his volatile personality. He had, in his work as well as in the Inklings, a strong preference for talk rather than the written word, and it was in lectures and tutorials that the best of him came out. When he lectured (as Stephen Medcalf recalled) ‘he would stare out over the heads of his audience as if seeing another world, sink himself in the cross-currents of Shakespeare’s mind, and himself, sometimes, become one of Shakespeare’s images. I remember his acting Death with “rotten mouth – iron teeth”.’ In tutorials he would begin by dispensing beer – ‘Bring out the buckets, men’ – yet he rarely drank it himself, wishing merely to raise his pupils to his own normal level of eloquence. He did not often allow them to read more than a few lines of their essays without interrupting with some enthusiastic comment or suggestion. He told them: ‘Write an essay. Write an essay. Must have something to stop me talking.’ Some were maddened by him. Others, such as Medcalf, left the tutorial hour ‘joyful under the impetus of irresistible gusto’.

  In the nineteen-sixties Dyson was seen briefly by a wider audience when he gave half a dozen unscripted television talks on Shakespeare for the BBC, at the instigation of the producer Patrick Garland who had been his pupil. He also introduced Garland’s television series Famous Gossips, and as a result of all this made a third and much more surprising appearance on screen in John Schlesinger’s film Darling, which starred Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde. Dyson was by his own admission no actor, but he performed with charm in his one scene, where he portrayed an elderly writer whose friendship and advice is sought by the principal characters. Dyson said of all this: ‘I think I’ve never been happier. The mere fact of being on television or in the cinema is so enormously flattering to a vain man; and though a timid man I have my vanity. I did enjoy it; my word I enjoyed it.’ His only complaint was about a scene in Darling where his funeral took place. ‘That I was sorry about. First of all I was not paid for it – you aren’t paid if you don’t appear – and second, well, there was Julie Christie saying what a lot I’d meant to her, you know, and I knew I hadn’t, and there was just a coffin brought on, and it was said to contain me, and I didn’t believe it did, you know. No, one doesn’t like being buried. I’m not ambitious, a quiet, timid man, but I didn’t like being buried.’

  *

  Lewis aroused equally strong reactions in his pupils as did Dyson. For every one of them who (like John Wain) managed to enjoy and to ape Lewis’s forceful logic, there were at least as many who were alarmed and cowed by the heavy-handedness of his manner, combined with his general refusal to put his relationship with his pupils on anything like a personal footing. A few lapped it up, but some very nearly ran away. ‘If you think that way about Keats you needn’t come here again!’ Lewis once roared down the stairs to a departing pupil. And on another occasion when an Australian student professed that he could never read Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, and refused to admit its good qualities even after Lewis had chanted a hundred lines of it at him, Lewis declared. ‘The sword must settle it!’ and reached for a broadsword and a rapier which (according to J. A. W. Bennett, who was there) were inexplicably in the corner of the room. They fenced – Lewis of course choosing the broadsword – and, said Bennett, ‘Lewis actually drew blood – a slight nick.’

  Lewis’s intellectual pugnacity found yet another outlet in the nineteen-forties. When the wave of wartime enthusiasm for Christianity was at its height in Oxford, Stella Aldwinckle, who was active in University church affairs, founded a Socratic Club, which was to be an open forum for religious argument and in particular an arena where Christians could dispute their beliefs with atheists. Lewis accepted the invitation to be President, and the Socratic Club quickly became popular with undergraduates. It could however hardly be said to be truly Socratic, for though it was supposed to be without doctrinal bias and was allegedly committed to following arguments wherever they led, it was in actual fact almost exclusively Christian in its membership; Christian, moreover, in a highly orthodox and sometimes aggressive manner.

  The usual pattern of meetings was that an atheist (or an agnostic, or sometimes a ‘liberal churchman’) would read a paper which would then be disputed, the discussion being opened by someone who held the opposite point of view. In practice, after the visiting speaker had been given his chance it was very often Lewis who opened the discussion; or rather, engaged the visitor in intellectual combat, refuting everything that had been said, to the delight of what was usually a highly partisan audience.

  John Wain sometimes observed these performances at the Socratic: ‘It was in practice a kind of prize-ring in which various champions appeared to try conclusions with Lewis, who week after week put on a knock-down-and-drag-out performance that was really impressive.’ Lewis was of course a highly skilled debater. Yet, even if he had not been, with the Socratic audience so heavily on his side he could hardly have failed to win the day. For example, when C. E. M. Joad, best known for his part in the BBC’s Brains Trust, visited the club in 1944 and read a paper that was mildly critical of some Christian notions, no sooner had he finished than according to Wain ‘the society’s Secretary, a formidable crop-haired young woman, was on her feet with the announcement, “Mr C. S. Lewis will now answer Dr Joad.” Lewis gently corrected her: “Open the discussion, I think, is the formula”. But to this Secretary and her like, those performances were no mere polite “opening” of discussions. An enemy had invaded the very hearthstone of the faithful, and it was a matter of “Christian, up and smite them!” – Christian, in this case, being Lewis.’

  The same patter
n was repeated with other visitors, such as J. B. S. Haldane, whose views on science and the progress of humanity had often raised Lewis’s righteous wrath in print, and the Oxford philosopher A. J. Ayer, who recalled of his appearance at the Socratic that he and Lewis ‘engaged in a flashy debate, which entertained the audience but did neither of us much credit’. But if Ayer was not impressed by the proceedings of the club, Lewis probably was. Certainly he was encouraged by the success and the popularity of his argumentative methods on these occasions, for during the early years of his Presidency of the Socratic his writings on Christianity were coloured by the kind of rhetoric that he used in the club’s debates. In his broadcast talks, in numerous articles, and in particular in his book Miracles he came to rely largely on the sheer force of argument.