The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (27 page)

At times, ‘Uncle Lewis’ seemed hardly to be performing but rather exploring a thought for the first time. And, so far was he from standing on ceremony or authority or superior learning that he started his lecture as he came through the door and finished it as he walked out. He was a popular and (not at all the same thing)
good
lecturer—lecturing sometimes to an audience of three hundred or more. He towered above his colleagues in the English faculty—at a time, admittedly, when lecturing standards were not high. His resonant voice suited the rostrum; he was always easily audible (something that could not be said of Tolkien).

Duties and Pleasures

Lewis also tutored, in his private digs, a select group of students not always of his own choosing. Some were women, as he reported to Albert in June 1926: “I have been bothered into the last job I ever expected to do this term: taking a class of girls once a week at one of the women’s Colleges. However, I am not engaged to be married yet, and there are always seven of them there together, and the pretty ones are stupid and the interesting ones are ugly, so it is alright.” Reminiscences from several “ladies of St. Hugh’s” whom he would tutor during World War II—including Rosamund (Rieu) Cowan, daughter of the Homer translator E. V. Rieu—agree that, after overcoming their trepidation about approaching this red-faced “man’s man” who disliked tutoring women and brooked no nonsense, they found him courteous and even kindly, demanding only that they speak their own minds clearly. Given that women outnumbered men in the English School, it was hardly possible for Lewis to avoid them.

Some of his charges drove him half-mad; for instance, John Betjeman, future poet laureate, whose aestheticism and frivolousness—including hauling around a teddy bear named Archibald Ormsby-Gore (inspiration for Sebastian Flyte’s Aloysius in
Brideshead Revisited
) and prostrating himself on Lewis’s floor declaring that he had no choice, given his poor performance as a student, but to enter Holy Orders—clashed badly with Lewis’s heartiness. The two did have points of connection, however, for Betjeman was no modernist, and they plotted together to submit parodies of T. S. Eliot poems to
The Dial
and
The Criterion
(the latter journal being edited by Eliot). Lewis also enjoyed a gathering of “super-undergraduates” in Betjeman’s rooms, including an “absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person” from the Belfast region—the poet Louis MacNeice, Betjeman’s schoolmate.

Betjeman represented the new breed, the Bright Young Things who came up between the world wars, for whom university life was champagne, plovers’ eggs, silk dressing gowns, sexual experimentation, and “luncheons, luncheons all the way.” He surprised Lewis with occasionally “creditable” papers, but the grammatical paradigms of Old English held absolutely no interest for him, and making excuses for work undone was an art form (“he hasn’t been able to read the O.E., as he was suspected for measles and forbidden to look at a book. Probably a lie, but what can one do?”). After Betjeman, notwithstanding his high church leanings, failed “Divvers” (a very basic exam in theology required of all undergraduates) for the second time, Lewis suggested he settle for a pass degree, without honors. Betjeman (who did in fact succeed at Divvers on the third try) blamed Lewis for his poor showing. He made the rift between them public, paying mock tribute in his 1933 poetry collection,
In Ghastly Good Taste
, to “Mr C. S. Lewis … whose jolly personality and encouragement to the author in his youth have remained an unfading memory for the author’s declining years,” prefacing his 1937 poetry volume,
Continual Dew
, with an acknowledgement to Mr. C. S. Lewis “for the fact on p. 256” (the book is forty-five pages long), and broadcasting his grievance with these lines in “A Hike on the Downs”:

Objectively, our Common Room

Is like a small Athenian State—

Except for Lewis: he’s all right

But do you think he’s
quite
first rate?

The novelist Henry Green—known at Oxford by his birth name, Henry Yorke—also went in for dissipated undergraduate parties and struggled with Lewis as a tutor, calling him “rude and incompetent.” Unlike Betjeman, however, Green liked Anglo-Saxon and shared this interest with Nevill Coghill, who became for a while a close friend; his jaundiced view of Lewis may have arisen from differing literary inclinations, for Green, as Maurice Bowra wrote, “thought nothing of Lewis’ gods, Sidney and Spenser,” while Lewis knew nothing of Green’s beloved nineteenth-century Russian novelists—a clash of tastes exacerbated, as the Green biographer Jeremy Treglown suggests, by the volatile mix of “Lewis’s abrasiveness [and] Henry’s passivity.”

With most of his tutorial charges, Lewis maintained a portcullis of reserve. When John Lawlor (later professor of English at the University of Keele) knocked one day on Lewis’s door to apologize for missing a scheduled session, “He cut short my apologies: ‘I’m not your schoolmaster, you know.’ It was coldly said, and coldly meant … I mustn’t think of our relationship as a personal one.” Yet sometimes the tutor-tutee relationship blossomed into friendship. Many pupils, including Lawlor, have recorded fond memories of their tutorial sessions with Lewis, the don perched in his tatty armchair in a swirl of tobacco smoke, dressed in shabby tweeds (“He looked more like an angler than a don”), doodling on a pad, always ready to challenge students on every possible intellectual front. Alan (Bede) Griffiths and Derek Brewer found him a sympathetic, incisive, challenging, inspiring guide. Martin Lings (who would become an influential Muslim thinker, discussed below) was grateful above all for his tutor’s “implacable criticism.” Alan Rook (who would become a successful war poet and vintner) said that tutorials with Lewis and occasional nightlong Madeira-and-dialectics sessions in Lewis’s Magdalen rooms left him feeling “happy but incompetent.” The literary critic W. W. Robson, though he disagreed profoundly with Lewis on questions of literary judgment, rejected the picture of him as a bully: “Lewis did not want to bully anyone … Nor—though his controversial manner sometimes lends colour to this belief—was he a brow-beater. His fault as an examiner was quite contrary to what undergraduates feared; he was too kind, being apt extravagantly to over-mark the papers of a candidate whose views he disliked.” Tutoring stole time from more important pursuits—it was the intellectual counterpart to all the domestic chores that awaited him at home—but it was, after all, what he was paid to do, and Lewis believed strongly in doing one’s duty.

Duty left room for pleasure, though. For Lewis, pleasure took three intense forms. One was solitary walks; he knew all the footpaths in Oxford and tramped them regularly. Another was solitary reading. Helen Gardner, the formidable critic whose admiration for Lewis was matched by her disagreements with him on many points—she wrote two admiring books on T. S. Eliot, one of Lewis’s b
ê
tes noires, and clashed with him over changes in the English syllabus—marveled at his capacity and generosity as a reader. A. N. Wilson attributes to the poet and critic William Empson (Lewis’s sometime adversary) the opinion that Lewis was “the best read man of his generation, one who read everything and remembered everything he read”—and many biographers have repeated the statement, though the source for it remains elusive. It is a plausible enough remark, though, for it is difficult to posit an alternative; Eliot, an obvious contender, was too busy with his banking job to challenge for the title.

A favorite place to read was Duke Humfrey’s Library, a fifteenth-century reading room at the Bodleian, with vaulted ceiling, hidden study-nooks, mullioned windows, and unlimited provisions of books and incunabula close to hand. “If only you could smoke and if only there were upholstered chairs, the Bodleian would be one of the most delightful places in the world,” Lewis wrote. He was thankful that talking was allowed, for he found the hum of conversation soothing rather than distracting. Like all great readers, he could create for himself a “wall of stillness,” as Helen Gardner put it. “To sit opposite him in Duke Humphrey,” Gardner recalled, “when he was moving steadily through some huge double-columned folio … was to have an object lesson in what concentration meant.”

The third recreation, balancing the other two, was hobnobbing. His latest discovery in this line was the Wee Teas (named after the “Wee Frees,” a minority sect of the Free Church of Scotland), a regular gathering of six junior lecturers convened over a three-course dinner, at a more convenient hour than the “Philosophers’ Teas” held in the afternoon by their seniors. Here Lewis locked philosophical horns with Gilbert Ryle (a realist and ordinary language philosopher in the tradition of Cook Wilson, adept at exposing the pitfalls of mind-body dualism), Harry Weldon, Frank Hardie (brother of future Inkling Colin Hardie), H. H. Price, and John Mabbott. Sometimes, intellectual games lightened the proceedings; Mabbott recalls hearing Frank Hardie quote John Alexander Smith’s Latin lines about Noah’s Ark:

Cum bove bos, grue grus, sue sus, cum tigride tigris,

Rhinoceros tum cum rhinocerote venit

With cow bull, with female crane male crane, with sow pig, with tigress tiger,

Then came bull rhinoceros with cow rhinoceros

At which, according to Mabbott, Lewis and Frank Hardie instantly added four more lines (though there is reason to think the four lines were composed beforehand by Barfield and Lewis):

Necnon ridicula cum mure it ridiculus mus,

Tum tom felis cum fele leone leo;

Et pterodactylium par nobile, parque draconum

Et dinos saurus dinaque saura sua

Likewise the silly mouse goes with his silly doe mouse,

Then tom-cat with molly-cat, lion with lioness;

And a noble pair of pterodactyls, and a pair of dragons,

And the terrible lizard with his terrible lizardess

Still, Lewis’s participation in the Wee Teas was limited. He relished intellectual scrapes but needed deeper comradeship. To date, Greeves, Barfield, and to some extent Coghill had filled that want. But Greeves was far away and a lesser intellect, and Barfield, although always exciting (“To Clive Hamilton: Opposition Is True Friendship” reads the dedication of
Poetic Diction
), insisted on cloaking his scintillating mind in Anthroposophical clouds. On May 11, 1926, however, at another tea—the late afternoon Merton College “English Tea” of the Oxford English School—he met a man who would become a close friend and profoundly affect his thought and work, a “smooth, pale fluent little chap” by the name of J.R.R. Tolkien.

8

A MEETING OF MINDS

Lewis’s impressions of his first meeting with Tolkien appear in his diary in telegraphed fashion: “can’t read Spenser because of the forms—thinks the language is the real thing in the school—thinks all literature is written for the amusement of
men
between thirty and forty—we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest—still the sound-changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons.” Lewis records Tolkien’s academic conservatism, noting that “his pet abomination is the idea of ‘liberal’ studies. Technical hobbies are more in his line” (presumably this would include calligraphy, painting, and invented languages) and ascribing to him a degree of male exclusivity that sounds just a bit too much like Lewis’s own view of the matter. Beyond that, he clearly has no idea of what he has encountered, remarking flippantly that there was “no harm in him: only needs a smack or so.” But it was Tolkien who would supply the smack, jolting Lewis—with the help of other friends and Lewis’s own desperate yearning—into Christian faith.

The first contact between the two was, however, professional. When Lewis remarked that Tolkien “thinks the language is the real thing in the school,” he was referring to a controversy over the proper balance between philological and literary study in the English syllabus—a controversy resolved in 1931, only to erupt more violently in the “lang. and lit.” debates of the 1950s and ’60s.

English has now become, for better or worse, the quintessential humanities subject. At this time, however, it was a relatively new field of study, established as an Honours subject in 1894 against much opposition. As the younger and scruffier cousin to Classics, which had long been the preeminent subject for Honours candidates in the Arts, the Faculty of English could not hope to achieve a similar dignity if it appeared simply to cater to a taste for Shakespeare’s plays, let alone modern novels. It needed rigor, and that rigor could be supplied by the demand that students master the ancient and medieval roots of their literary heritage, its Germanic antecedents, its Norman and Celtic influences, and its most recondite texts. But this posed a serious problem. From the earliest days of the English School, most candidates for instruction cared nothing for these subjects. An unsigned 1890s pamphlet, “A Perilous Protest Against Certain Lewd Fellows of the Baser Sort, banding Themselves together under the name of ‘Philologists,’” reads like a precursor of Betjeman’s tirades:

The school of English Lang. and Litt.

In our opinion should be split,

For he who has the sort of wit

To score a bit on English Litt.,

Is not, egad, the kind of man

To babble Lithuanian.

The crux of the issue, as Tolkien saw it, was twofold: the “lit.” track lacked necessary grounding in the philology and sources of English literary tradition, while the “lang.” track shortchanged the study of medieval texts qua literature. He despised the very term “lang. and lit.,” suggesting that its “banishment is probably the first need of reform in the Oxford School,” and argued for “A” and “B” instead. He did not think language the primary subject and literature an appendix, as some charged; in his view, they had equal merit and should be partners rather than rivals. In an essay, “The Oxford English School,” that appeared in May 1930 in
The Oxford Magazine
amid ads for a recital by the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska and “Hayes and Son, the Oldest Established Bookbinders in Oxford”—traditionalism was in the ascendant in Oxford just then—Tolkien advanced his agenda. To many modern eyes, it will appear to be traditionalism run rampant. He urged educators on the lit. side to cut back the study of “the thousand years at the modern end” of literature, including the elimination of nineteenth-century studies, to be replaced by “worthy Anglo-Saxon and Middle English texts.” The lang. track needed similar reform; the syllabus should stop at
A.D.
1400—even though this would mean sacrificing Shakespeare’s transformation of the English tongue—to make room for the study of cognate languages like Old Icelandic, with its rich literary tradition, and Gothic, “a main source of the poetic inspiration of ancient England and the North.”