The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (24 page)

What a paradox, then, was Lewis’s existence during the 1920s! Why would a young man who cherished autonomy, resented interference, preferred the company of males, and regarded marriage as a lamentable lapse (“that fatal tomb of all lively and interesting men”) enter into a relationship akin to marriage—and one fracturing from within—with a woman who, whatever her virtues, excelled at quarrels and giving orders? Lewis’s solemn pledge to Paddy Moore that he would look after his mother had something to do with it, of course; even while an atheist, he held some things sacred. Most likely, sexual attraction for Mrs. Moore played also a part. The war entered in as well, or rather its aftermath, when a generation sought to redefine itself by at once salvaging the past (thus Tolkien’s intensified search for England’s mythology) and beginning anew. Had Lewis been a bit younger, he might have been one of the Bright Young Things worshipping Oscar Wilde while throwing off conventional restraint; but the world lay too heavily upon Lewis and his generation of returning soldiers for ironic hedonism to present itself as a solution. And for Lewis in particular, the weight of the world meant, in large measure, his father. In Mrs. Moore he found the counterweight that would give, however painfully, a new sense of balance and the promise of a second chance. It was just that: a chance to create a world of his own away from his father and a chance to re-create the domestic paradise despoiled by his mother’s death. By surrendering to Mrs. Moore, Lewis kept his promise to Paddy, escaped his father, reclaimed his past, and built a new future, albeit in the oddest way possible: by surrendering the freedom of college life for the dictatorial matriarchy he called “ordinary domestic life.”

Lewis’s domestic arrangements also served—in retrospect this would seem providential—as a cure for self-absorption. As he put it in
Surprised by Joy
, his “hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged.” In later years, Lewis liked to quote George MacDonald’s maxim “the one principle of hell is—‘I am my own.’” Life with Mrs. Moore ensured that Lewis could not call his soul his own, could not shield himself, as he had done with his father, from interference and irrational demands. So it was a purgatory, but not a hell. Lewis may have suffered under her roof, but he certainly didn’t stagnate: his diary records many lively conversations with intellectual friends, conversations in which Mrs. Moore sometimes took part; and he continued to read omnivorously from Greek and Roman classics to Shelley, Freud, Jung, William James, and Walter de la Mare. Best of all, an exciting new friendship was dawning. In 1923 he befriended Nevill Coghill, an admirer of Tolkien and a future Inkling.

Coghill, five months Lewis’s junior, had grown up a few hundred miles south of him, in an Irish Protestant family among the lush green hills and nationalist ardors of County Cork. He, too, had fought in World War I, on the Macedonian front, enrolled in Oxford right after the war, distinguished himself as a fiddler and boatman, and, like Lewis, won his First in English literature and language in a single year rather than the usual three. He had a rough-and-tumble, earthy air about him, which attracted Lewis right away. John Wain later painted a memorable portrait of him: “[Coghill] was a big man built on generous lines … He smiled easily, revealing somewhat battered teeth, and indeed his whole face had a slightly rough, knocked-about quality, like a chipped statue. But it was a noble statue, generous in expression and bearing. His voice was deep and strong, his speech soft and gentle, and this contrast was carried through everything. He was totally courteous, a gentleman by instinct as well as by tradition…” W. H. Auden—inspired by his tutorial sessions with Coghill to change course from engineering to English—would pay tribute to Coghill’s courtesy in a poem on the occasion of Coghill’s retirement, reminding him that “you countenanced all species” yet “never looked cross or sleepy” even “when our essays were / more about us than Chaucer.” Auden also dedicated his celebrated collection of essays,
The Dyer’s Hand
, to Coghill as “a tutor in whom one could confide.”

Lewis first noticed Coghill in a class taught by George Stuart Gordon, by now Merton Professor of English Literature. During Hilary term each year, Gordon held a weekly discussion class for Honours candidates in English. It was on February 2, 1923, in this happy setting, ideal for the formation of intellectual friendships, that Coghill read a paper on “Realism from
Gorboduc
to
Lear
.” Lewis’s diary entry for the day speaks of him almost in a schoolgirl’s smitten voice, as “a good looking fellow … an enthusiastic sensible man, without nonsense, and a gentleman, much more attractive than the majority.” Two days later, Lewis met Coghill again, at a tea held by the formidable tutor of Old English at St. Hugh’s College, Edith Elizabeth Wardale, who remained in the background as the two students volleyed merrily over literary likes and dislikes. Coghill said he couldn’t share Lewis’s love of Morris and Langland (strangely, since Coghill would one day be a renowned interpreter of Langland as well as Chaucer). They agreed that Blake was as inspired as Joan of Arc had been, but differed about the source of that inspiration, Lewis bristling at Coghill’s accusation that he (Lewis) was a materialist.

The following week, Lewis read his paper on
The Faerie Queene
to Gordon’s class. As class stenographer, Coghill had the usual task of preparing the minutes in verse. He wrote in a mock-Chaucerian vein, prefacing a long description of his new acquaintance’s argument with a courteous exordium that begins “In Oxenford some clerk
é
s of degree / Were gadr
é
d in a goodlye companye" and goes on to praise “
Sir Lewis
 … a good philosopher,” noting in particular “Well couthe he speken in the Greek
é
tongue.” Later Coghill would recall how dazzled he had been by Lewis’s “combative pleasure” while delivering his paper, which “was certainly the best the class had heard.”
The Faerie Queene
, he wrote,

was a world he could inhabit and believe in … its knights, dwarfs, and ladies were real to him, and became real even to me while he discussed them: he rejoiced as much in the ugliness of the giants and in the beauty of the ladies as in their spiritual significances, but most of all in the ambience of the faerie forest and plain that, he said, were carpeted with a grass greener than the common stuff of ordinary glades; this was the
reality
of grass, only to be apprehended in poetry: the world of the imagination was nearer to the truth than the world of the senses …

We may detect here the early influence of Barfield’s viewpoint. Even the gods, Coghill noticed, were real to Lewis, as long as they remained in the world of imagination and did not challenge his atheism directly.

Within a few days the friendship blossomed. Their mutual love of literature and of conversational fencing—Coghill’s deep and mellow voice a perfect match for Lewis’s deep, more strident one—glued them one to the other. They spent the year, under the shared tutelage of F. P. Wilson, exploring English literature for eight or ten hours a day. Their minds caught fire. “It was,” Coghill wrote, “a continuous intoxication of discovery: to almost every week came its amazement.” With the war behind them, a life of art and scholarship ahead, “we were uninhibitedly happy in our work and felt supported by an endless energy.”

Coghill knew nothing at this time of Lewis’s problems with his father or of his relationship with Mrs. Moore. He did know that Lewis was at his best out of doors, preferably at a distance from home and college. The two friends met regularly for country rambles, bounding from one hill and one idea to another as they talked for hours on end. They agreed—rapturously—about Milton, Matthew Arnold, and so much more; they disagreed—violently—about Congreve, Restoration comedy, and the value of theater; but above all, they disagreed about Christianity. For Coghill, Lewis was astonished to discover, was a Christian.

Here was something new: a bright, creative, voracious mind who was a “supernaturalist” and, what’s more, an orthodox one with a love of ecclesiastical and liturgical tradition. Coghill was a devout Anglican, deeply committed to the English Catholic revival of the 1920s; he would be one of the few laymen invited to address the 1927 Anglo-Catholic Congress on the Holy Eucharist (his speech echoes Lewis’s skepticism about finding evidence for God in nature; but in Coghill’s view, the failure of the classical argument from design is all the more reason to believe in and adore the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, undetectable to the senses).

The ground was rolling and cracking under Lewis’s feet, as he recounts in
Surprised by Joy
: so many of his favorite writers, MacDonald, Chesterton, Johnson, Spenser, Milton—and now friends like Coghill—all Christians. How could this be? And, compounding his distress, why was he still unable to find a job? In 1924, Coghill landed a fellowship in English at Exeter, while Lewis found every door shut. One solace remained, putting pen to paper. Long letters and longer diary entries poured out, recounting his reading, his passions, his hopes. At the same time, he toiled away on what would become his longest and perhaps best narrative poem,
Dymer.

Dymer

The idea had come to him when he was seventeen; Lewis said he did not consciously invent it. It was, on the surface at least, a horrific tale: a man fathers a monster; the monster slays his father and becomes a god.

Lewis began to write the story in prose during Christmas 1916 at Little Lea; in December 1918, while convalescing in a military hospital, he attempted a verse version, “The Redemption of Ask,” soon abandoned. Finally, on April 2, 1922, sitting by the sunny window in his bedroom while Mrs. Moore cut up oranges for marmalade, he had his breakthrough: he saw how he could re-create
Dymer
as a narrative poem in rhyme royal. So he began:

You stranger, long before your glance can light

Upon these words, time will have washed away

The moment when I first took pen to write,

With all my road before me …

For the next three years, Lewis labored to draw forth from his initial inspiration a story of mythic proportions and a prosody noble enough to go with it.

Lewis told Arthur that the main theme was “development by self-destruction”; to Coghill he called it “redemption by parricide.” The poem seethes with anger against totalitarianism and war and coruscates with insatiable longings. It begins as a broad social satire, with Dymer’s birth in a Perfect City—a modern Plato’s Republic with a planned economy and all-embracing bureaucracy from which no misfit can hide:

At Dymer’s birth no comets scared the nation,

The public cr
ê
che engulfed him with the rest,

And twenty separate Boards of Education

Closed round him. He passed through every test,

Was vaccinated, numbered, washed and dressed,

Proctored, inspected, whipt, examined weekly,

And for some nineteen years he bore it meekly.

When the life force (Lewis had been reading Bergson) invades the stifling classroom in the form of an April breeze, young Dymer breaks into a wild mirth, kills his teacher, and flees to the open field. So far he would seem to be a rebel after the pattern of Blake’s Los, championing the cause of imagination, energy, sensuality, and freedom; but Dymer’s rebellion, which sets off a bloody revolution, propels him into desperate adventures. He wanders naked into a castle, where he spies his body in a mirror, triggering a narcissistic trance. He dreams he is a great hero, then a great tyrant, and then he enjoys passionate sex with a girl who appears in the dark of night and slips into his arms.

In the morning his lover is gone—he never even saw her face. Maddened by loss, he sets out after her, confronting an old matriarch and a succession of gruesome figures. A magician (based on Yeats) offers Dymer an occult potion that will empower him to retrieve his beloved and recapture his lost ecstasy; Dymer drinks but by now he has begun to repent, and the potion fails to overpower his will. The magician goes mad and shoots him. In agony from the wound, Dymer at last meets his mysterious bride, only to discover that she is none other than his own desire for transcendence, misconstrued as lust. In the final canto, he confronts the monstrous son born from their union, kills him, and dies declaiming heroic platitudes. Out of all this death—and, readers might ruefully note, out of all this furious convolution of plot—good comes: spring returns and all revives, “that country clothed with dancing flowers / Where flower had never grown,” the monster-son becomes a god, and Dymer, though dead, is redeemed.

Dymer
succeeds, as Lewis acknowledged, in at least one of its purposes: to write the poem had been a necessary catharsis. He, like Dymer, had been obsessed with recapturing the ecstasies of the past. “To ‘get it again,’” he would write in
Surprised by Joy
, “became my constant endeavor; while reading every poem, hearing every piece of music, going for every walk, I stood anxious sentinel at my own mind to watch whether the blessed moment was beginning and to endeavor to retain it if it did.” He found it couldn’t be done. Like Dymer, his initial reaction to this failure was angry rejection; and with the “new psychology” whispering to him that his romantic longings were really sublimated lust, he set out to “unmask and defeat” the stratagems of wish-fulfilling fantasy. Like Dymer, Lewis succumbed for a time to pessimism and, like Dymer, he was tempted by magic; but in the end he came to his senses, rejecting both despair and empty promises. He grew up.

Among the wish-fulfilling fantasies that died with Dymer was Lewis’s image of himself as a major poet. The first blow was a peremptory rejection from Heinemann, publisher of
Spirits in Bondage
. This stung Lewis so bitterly that he sat down and wrote himself a long letter minutely analyzing his desire to see
Dymer
succeed:

My desire then contains two elements. (a) The desire for some proof to myself that I am a poet. (b) The desire that my poet-hood should be acknowledged even if no one knows that it is mine … As far as I can see both these are manifestations of the single desire for what may be called mental or spiritual rank. I have flattered myself with the idea of being among my own people when I was reading the poets and it is unpleasing to have to stand down and take my place in the crowd. Such a desire is contrary to my own settled principles: the very principles which I expressed in Dymer.