The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (26 page)

Once Lewis became a Christian, he would look back on his absolute idealism as a “quasi-religion” that “cost nothing,” mainly because there was no way to trace the lines of connection between the Absolute and the empirical individual self. “We could talk religiously about the Absolute: but there was no danger of Its doing anything about us.” Idealism was a system of ideas and aspirations that “cannot be lived”—and a philosophy that cannot be lived is no philosophy at all. In
Surprised by Joy
, Lewis heightens the drama of his conversion account by depicting Barfield and Griffiths as rebuking him on this point (philosophy “wasn’t a
subject
to Plato … it was a way”); but according to Barfield the story is “pure applesauce”—Lewis, he said, was “constitutionally incapable of treating philosophy as a merely academic exercise.”

Whatever its defects as a
way
, however, Lewis never regretted his idyll with idealism. When he had shed his materialist skin and was feeling painfully naked, idealism provided a way to cloak that nakedness for a time. He saw, with its help, that if one trusts one’s own judgment, one’s ability to discern truth—as he did, as all thinking people inevitably do—then one must embrace the idea that “mind was no late-come epiphenomenon; that the whole universe was, in the last resort, mental; that our logic was participation in a cosmic
Logos
” (the influence of Barfield is palpable). Lewis found in idealism a more satisfactory account than materialism could supply of the sacrifices of his comrades in war, the moral seriousness of his friends, and the demands of his own conscience. When his instinct for adoration seemed thwarted at every turn, idealism offered a higher reality to adore intellectually, purely for its own sake, without a hell to fear or a heaven to hope for. Idealism was a rational and ethical mysticism, full of Spirit and free of spirits. It made no occult—or Anthroposophical—claims about intercourse with beings from other worlds. It was sane and wholesome, noble and disinterested. It cleared away obstacles, overcame intellectual inhibitions, and upheld the sense of a universal moral standard (the Tao, as he would call it in
The Abolition of Man
). “And so the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my tongue.”

The hook was in the tongue, but of more importance to Lewis at the time, his tongue had finally found an audience. In the spring of 1924, he expanded his philosophical studies, reading with great zest the biography and ethical writings of the Cambridge Platonist Henry More with a view to a D.Phil. dissertation, and lecturing to the Oxford Philosophical Society on “The Promethean Fallacy in Ethics”—a talk that one professor of moral philosophy, William Ross David of Oriel College, found “very attractive.” E. F. Carritt tipped him off about a philosophy fellowship at Trinity College. The prospect dazzled Lewis, who reported in his diary that while heading home in the icy wind, he found himself “in a strange state of excitement—and all on the mere hundredth chance of getting it.” He didn’t get it, but entry into the promised land was delayed, not withdrawn: on May 5, University College asked him if he would like to tutor philosophy in place of Carritt, who was on his way to America for a year. Lewis gladly accepted; his desert wanderings had ended.

Contemplation and Enjoyment in the Lecture Hall

Lewis spent the next academic year (1924–25) tutoring, grading examination papers, and lecturing—a twice-weekly series beginning in October (Michaelmas term) on “The Good, Its Position among Values” and a similar series during Hilary term. A year later, he landed a position as fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, with additional responsibility to tutor in philosophy.
The Times
heralded the five-year renewable appointment; Lewis would keep the post for twenty-nine years. He made no note of the pivotal day—May 20, 1925, two months before Tolkien would land his professorship in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford—in his diary, which he had suspended writing for several months. Fortunately, his father kept up his own journal, recording that when he, well aware of his son’s poverty, heard the news via telegram, “I went up to [Jack’s] room and burst into tears of joy. I knelt down and thanked God with a full heart. My prayers have been heard and answered.” Lewis himself was at the moment applying poultices to his right thumb, bitten deeply on this joyous day by a cat, as he rushed to stop it from lacerating a dog; as he was coming to realize, kindness and pain, joy and suffering are twins in this fallen world.

This truth applies also to the microworld of academia. The Oxford system, in which attendance at lectures was optional, made it difficult for a rank newcomer to fill a classroom. By the end of his term as a substitute lecturer on philosophy, Lewis wrote in his diary, “my audience had dwindled to two—Hawker [Gerald Wynne Hawker, an undergraduate] and the old parson. As they professed a wish to continue the course, I had them to my room. I said we could now be informal and I hoped they would interrupt whenever they wanted. The old parson availed himself of this so liberally that I could hardly get a word in.” Lewis was determined to do better in his new incarnation as a lecturer in English and accordingly trained himself to talk from notes rather than read from a prepared script.

From one perspective, the change from philosophy to English was a step down. English studies still had a lingering reputation for being the “soft option” in the Arts, suitable for women and second-rate scholars destined to become schoolmasters or civil servants; during his undergraduate days, Lewis had found the atmosphere of the English School (as the Faculty of English was known) “amateurish” compared to Philosophy. But he made the best of it, telling his father, “I have come to think if I had the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy. A continued search among the abstract roots of things, a perpetual questioning of all that plain men take for granted, a chewing the cud for fifty years over inevitable ignorance and a constant frontier watch on the little tidy lighted conventional world of science and daily life—is this the best life for temperaments such as ours? Is it the way of health or even of sanity?” Philosophy was too solitary and esoteric a discipline for the healthy person he dearly wished to be; nonetheless, he valued the ammunition it (and Barfield) gave him against the na
ï
ve positivisms of the day: “It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word: that Darwin and Spencer undermining ancestral beliefs stand themselves on a foundation of sand; of gigantic assumptions and irreconcilable contradictions an inch below the surface. It leaves the whole thing rich in possibilities: and if it dashes the shallow optimisms it does the same for the shallow pessimisms.”

He was also, according to his diary, rereading the
Hippolytus
of Euripides in March 1924, an event that, according to
Surprised by Joy
, “annihilated the last remains of the New Look.” We can only guess at what it was about the
Hippolytus
that affected him so deeply; certainly there was little to incite devotion in the capricious gods and ill-fated heroes that Euripides describes. But whatever applications Lewis may have found to his own life in this story, the main outcome of reading it was to reawaken the longing for Joy. “I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days at Bookham. There was nothing whatever to do about it; no question of returning to the desert. I had been simply ordered—or, rather, compelled—to ‘take that look off my face.’” In retrospect he would see this as the “first Move” God made toward an impending checkmate. The second Move came the following week, when he read Samuel Alexander’s 1920 book (based on his Gifford Lectures),
Space, Time, and Deity
. Largely forgotten today, Alexander was a pivotal figure in debates between realists and idealists, an influence on Alfred North Whitehead and a forerunner of process philosophy. He developed an emergent model of mental life, in which conscious experience, and with it the sense of self and all the moral and aesthetic intuitions, arises out of neural structures as a genuine
novum
, dependent upon yet irreducible to its material elements. At the end of May, Lewis heard Alexander in person, a classically eccentric don, now “bearded and deaf and very venerable,” deliver to the Oxford Philosophical Society a paper on artistic creation—a “satisfying attack on all Croce’s nonsense,” culminating in a grand (though to Lewis hard to follow) vision of “cosmic creation.”

What Lewis found most helpful in
Space, Time, and Deity
was the distinction Alexander made between enjoyment and contemplation, a phenomenological analysis of experience that did much, Lewis thought, to overcome the mind-body split, by showing that in every experience there are two aspects: an act of perceiving and an object of perception. One enjoys the act of perceiving and one contemplates the thing perceived. He tried explaining this idea to his philosophy students while a strike was raging outside. “My class was completely unruffled by the strike and still very interested in Berkeley. Miss Thring read a paper. The discussion turned on the self. I told them about Alexander’s distinction of contemplation and enjoyment and they all (I think) got it quite clear. Miss Colborne was specially good, saying to Miss Grant (who wanted to ‘know’ the self) ‘It is as if, not content with seeing with your eyes, you wanted to take them out and look at them—and then they wouldn’t be eyes.’”

Alexander pointed out that the error of the materialist is to count as real the thing seen and discount as mere epiphenomenon the act of seeing. But there is an opposite error, at once moral and epistemological, which Lewis thought he could see in himself: that of the subjectivist who overvalues his experience and undervalues its object. “I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy, all my vain hopes to find some mental content on which I could, so to speak, lay my finger and say, ‘This is it,’ had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed.” It was a liberating discovery. The “quiver in the diaphragm” wasn’t what he was searching for; that was the path of the spiritual voluptuary. Now he had discovered the “inherent dialectic of desire,” realizing that “all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, ‘It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of?’” However Alexander may have helped in the process of discovery, Lewis’s account of the dialectic of desire is far closer in spirit and rhetoric to the
Confessions
of the great convert-saint Augustine of Hippo:

I asked the earth and it answered, “I am not He”; and all things that are in the earth made the same confession. I asked the sea and the deeps and the creeping things, and they answered, “We are not your God; seek higher.” I asked the winds that blow, and the whole air with all that is in it answered, “Anaximenes was wrong; I am not God.” I asked the heavens, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they answered, “Neither are we God whom you seek.” And I said to all the things that throng about the gateways of the senses: “Tell me of my God, since you are not He. Tell me something of Him.” And they cried out in a great voice: “He made us.” My question was my gazing upon them, and their answer was their beauty.

Lewis was approaching the “region of awe,” convinced that the call of Joy was drawing him out of himself toward a reunion with that mysterious Other (he stopped short of saying “God”) that held the secret of his identity.

But there was much else on his mind just now. At the beginning of Michaelmas term 1925, he relocated his academic home to rooms in Magdalen College’s eighteenth-century “New Building,” overlooking the Deer Park, in surroundings “beautiful beyond expectation and beyond hope,” as he told his father; and once inducted there as a fellow (the ceremony of admission was, embarrassingly, “a kneeling affair” involving Latin declarations for which no one had prepared him), his horizons instantly broadened. Since there were not enough students reading English to fill up his requisite tutorial hours, he began to tutor in philosophy and political science as well
.
Magdalen was the wealthiest of the Oxford colleges, but undeveloped in some areas—particularly the new PPE (Philosophy, Politics, and Economics) program, the modern alternative to Greats. It also had the reputation of being the foppish and reactionary aristocrats’ favorite among Oxford colleges, a place for Etonians and Harrovians to win boat races, make the right connections, and academically squeak by (it was, after all, Bertie Wooster’s college). All this would soon change, however, thanks to maverick dons like the Philosophy tutor T. D. (Harry) Weldon, of whom Lewis said, “Contempt is his ruling passion: courage his chief virtue”; and though Lewis’s sympathies were with the old-guard dons, who were, in the main, churchgoing humanists, medievalists, and defenders of philosophical idealism, he would support efforts to raise the admission standards and make Magdalen as distinguished academically as it had been for “rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication.”

From the beginning, his lectures—on “Some Eighteenth-Century Precursors of the Romantic Movement,” followed the next year by “Some English Thinkers of the Renaissance”—were gratifyingly well attended, “a pleasant change,” he told his father, “from talking to empty rooms in Greats.” It was not long before he began to make a powerful impression both as lecturer and tutor. His most famous lectures—“The Romance of the Rose and its Successors” beginning in Michaelmas term 1928, the “Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry” lectures beginning in Hilary term 1932, and the “Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Studies” lectures throughout the 1930s, in which the previous two series were combined—soon would make him a genuine celebrity in Oxford and beyond.

Reminiscences by those who attended these talks tell of the red face and booming voice, the rich, detailed presentations, and the rapt, enthusiastic crowds. Lewis had developed a trademark style, slow enough for note taking, loud enough to rouse the dullest listener, straightforward, abundantly furnished with quotations, and lavish in wit. He supported his prodigious memory by keeping two notebooks at the podium, one with a detailed outline on the left and illustrative matter on the right, the other a “Thickening” notebook furnished with additional anecdotes and examples. Paul Johnson remembers Magdalen Hall filled with “girls squatting or lying at his feet, displaying their stocky legs.” Harry Blamires, in a note he sent to Warnie Lewis, recalls that “as a lecturer he was the biggest ‘draw’ the English School had in the nineteen-thirties. He could fill the largest lecture rooms. He was popular because his lectures were meaty. He purveyed what was wanted in a palatable form. Proportion and direction were always preserved, but without forcing. Points were clearly enumerated; arguments beautifully articulated; illustrations richly chosen.” The poet and medievalist Sister Mary Madeleva Wolff, C.S.C., who during a sabbatical year in 1934 attended the “Prolegomena to Medieval Poetry” lectures (as well as lectures by Tolkien), before returning to America to become president of St. Mary’s College in Indiana, wrote to her Mother Superior to say that they were the best lectures she had ever heard. Alastair Fowler, who attended the “Prolegomena” lectures in the 1950s, recalls being impressed by Lewis’s “avuncular informality”: