The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (28 page)

Lewis, although far more sympathetic to postmedieval English literature, came to share Tolkien’s vision for the reform of the syllabus and joined in the campaign, which lasted from their first acquaintance in 1926 until victory in 1931. Lewis read a paper (“Our English Syllabus”) to the English Society at Oxford, lambasting the study of modern literature as “an intrinsic absurdity,” declaring that “the student who wants a tutor’s assistance in reading the works of his own contemporaries might as well ask for a nurse’s assistance in blowing his own nose.” The analogy says, inter alia, much about Lewis’s view of modern literature. In “The Idea of an ‘English School’” (a paper he delivered to a joint meeting of the Classical and English Associations), while proudly proclaiming his literary conservatism (“if any question of the value of classical studies were before us, you would find me on the extreme right”), Lewis argues that the origins of modern English literature, and therefore the necessary study of those who would understand this literature, lie not, as is commonly supposed, in Greek and Roman classics, which brought to English neither form nor spirit but only “matter” (i.e., subject matter), but in Anglo-Saxon. In the tongue of Beowulf he discerns “a sense of language … native to us all.”

By the early 1930s, those members of the English School who shared the same viewpoint established, along with Tolkien and Lewis, a club known as “the Cave” to advance their interests. They took their name from the biblical Cave of Adullam (1 Samuel 22:2), in which “every one that was discontented” assembled around David, awaiting their return to power—by then “Cave of Adullam” was a familiar way to lampoon any group of political malcontents (such as the Jacobites in Sir Walter Scott’s historical novel
Waverly
) that retreats in the hope of better days ahead. The Cave lasted until World War II, becoming, once its core agenda had been achieved, a distant cousin of the Inklings. In addition to Lewis and Tolkien, Cave members who would double as Inklings included Nevill Coghill, the Anglo-Saxonist C. L. (Charles Leslie) Wrenn, who collaborated with Tolkien on the curriculum and in
Beowulf
studies (he would succeed Tolkien, in 1946, as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor), and Henry Dyson, a World War I veteran with an Oxford degree in English (Exeter College), then a lecturer in English, a passionate teacher and boisterous advocate for traditional humane learning at the University of Reading (he would return in glory to Oxford in 1945 as a Merton College fellow and tutor); activities included readings, dinners, and chat, but differed from those of the more celebrated circle by, among other things, inviting women to participate.

By October 1931, Lewis was crowing to Warnie that “next year is the first exam held under the syllabus which my party and I have forced upon the junto after much hard fighting: so that if I get a good colleague we shall be able to some extent to mould the new tradition. In fact, in English School politics, the anti-junto is in the ascendant—perhaps, from a prejudiced point of view, might be said to have become the junto.” Lewis was too much the moralist, however, and too recent the convert, to forget that any junto, however correct its views, may turn into an “inner ring”: “How long will it take us to become corrupt in our turn?” he asked. As it happened, the views of Tolkien and Lewis, with some compromises and modifications, prevailed at Oxford for many years, with the study of English literature beginning with
Beowulf
and ending just shy of the Victorians. Old English, the heart and soul of the old regime, ceased to be a required course only as of 2002.

“The Fire Was Bright and the Talk Good”

The Cave was not the only proto-Inklings group at Oxford during this era. In 1926, Tolkien founded the Kolb
í
tars (coal-biters; that is, men who huddled around the fire against the Icelandic cold) devoted to intensive study of Old Norse literature. The club lasted for seven years, meeting, when possible, every other Monday morning. It counted among its members Lewis, Coghill, George Stuart Gordon (soon to become president of Magdalen College), and the lexicographer C. T. (Charles Talbut) Onions (1873–1965), fourth editor of the
OED
and a tutor and fellow of Magdalen. Tolkien dominated the meetings with fluent translations of extensive blocks of texts, while the novices, notably Lewis and Coghill, followed along as best they could or tackled, with considerably less success, much briefer passages. Lewis reveled in the study, poring over his Icelandic dictionary to catch sight of the names of gods or giants that would send him into “a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music.” He liked the group’s philological tilt, but he loved its focus on myth and the opportunity it afforded to mingle with others who shared this love. His enthusiasm was unbounded; he records, in a letter to Arthur, that one evening he stayed up until 2:30 a.m., talking with Tolkien about “the gods & giants & Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind & rain—who cd. turn him out, for the fire was bright and the talk good?”

The friendship with Tolkien blossomed. In a letter to Arthur, Lewis describes his colleague as a friend “of the 2 class,” along with Dyson—just a notch below Greeves and Barfield. The feeling was warmly reciprocated; Tolkien, if he had thought in these categories, may have even considered Lewis a friend of the first class, for he removed his concealing armor and read out loud to him, in the intimate privacy of 22 Northmoor Road, substantial portions of the legendarium. At the end of 1929, he sent Lewis his long poem about Beren and L
ú
thien; Lewis read it and wrote back immediately, applauding the work’s “sense of reality,” mythic power, and freedom from contrived allegory: “I sat up late last night … I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight: and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it.” This must have been honey in Tolkien’s ear. Lewis followed this initial report, a month or two later, with a fourteen-page analysis that parodied assorted literary and theological styles while lauding and pinpointing problems in Tolkien’s work. Basking in the glow of Lewis’s initial praise and open to suggestion, Tolkien accepted most of his friend’s recommendations.

Despite Lewis’s enthusiasm, however, Tolkien continued to withhold his legendarium from publishers. Only some minor poems, an essay on the
Ancrene Wisse
, and a few other bits of scholarship made it into print at this time. In 1931 he further lifted the veil on his private creations, delivering to an Oxford philological gathering a talk he called “A Hobby for the Home” (later retitled “A Secret Vice”). In this essay, Tolkien reveals his passion for inventing artificial languages, recounting his explorations in Animalic, Nevbosh, Naffarin, Quenya, Noldorin, and the like. He also makes the following observation, detailing what might be called the Tolkien Law of Language Creation: “For perfect construction of an art-language it is found necessary to construct at least in outline a mythology … the making of language and mythology are related functions; to give your language an individual flavour, it must have woven into it the threads of an individual mythology … The converse indeed is true, your language construction will
breed
a mythology.” To bring this to fruition, and to present his most closely held secret vice to the world, would be the great work of the next two decades.

Allegories of Love

It has been observed that a man becomes a man, in the fullness of being, only when his father dies; this seems to be true in the case of C. S. Lewis. The relationship between father and son had improved; in his diary, Albert described a visit from Lewis and Warnie to Belfast over the 1926–27 Christmas holiday as “Roses all the way.” For Lewis the roses bristled with briars, but this was a distinct improvement over previous years. Several more visits ensued over the next few years. In May 1928, Albert resigned with a pension from his post, held for nearly forty years, as county solicitor. He had little more than a year to enjoy retirement, for in August 1929 he fell seriously ill. Lewis rushed to his bedside; an operation disclosed cancer; Albert died on September 25, 1929. Lewis sent a telegram to Warnie, stationed in Shanghai, informing him of their father’s death. It took the two brothers, with Lewis shouldering most of the burden, nine months to dispose of Little Lea and its contents. Warnie returned from Shanghai in April 1930, and the climactic moment in the process came when he and Lewis together retrieved their childhood toys, stored in an attic trunk, and buried them in the vegetable garden. “We will resolve them into their elements,” wrote Lewis to his brother, “as nature will do to us.” This nine-month obsequies, eerily like an inverted pregnancy, produced an unexpected birth. For two weeks after the sale of Little Lea, the two brothers, along with Mrs. Moore and her daughter, looking for a house in which they could all reside, discovered, far from the Oxford bustle, near a small pond bordered by moss and harboring coots and ducks—where, legend had it, Shelley once passed a day brooding atheistically—a property called the Kilns. “J and I went out and saw the place on Sunday morning, and I instantly caught the infection,” wrote Warnie in his diary (July 7, 1930), adding that the garden was “such stuff as dreams are made on.” The brothers moved in during October 1930 and would stay there until their death.

But a greater birth impended, for Lewis was about to move into new spiritual quarters as well. Of his conversion to Christianity, we will say more below; first there is a scholarly transformation to record. The long hours in Duke Humfrey’s Library poring over manuscripts, incunabula, and recondite editions of medieval and Renaissance poetry were beginning to bear fruit in his first and most important book of literary scholarship, to be published in 1936 as
The Allegory of Love
. He dedicated the book “
TO OWEN BARFIELD WISEST AND BEST OF MY UNOFFICIAL TEACHERS
.”

Lewis had originally contemplated writing a book about Erasmus, but found that Renaissance studies sent him back to the Middle Ages, and the Middle Ages to classical antiquity. Now he decided that his subject was simply “Old Europe.” Reaching from late antiquity to the cusp of early modernity, Old Europe was the perennial spring from which the modern wasteland could be reirrigated; the “Renaissance,” on the other hand, was a fiction concocted to devalue the “Middle Ages.” Nevill Coghill recalled running into Lewis on Addison’s Walk, just as this realization was dawning:

… I saw him coming slowly towards me, his round, rubicund face beaming with pleasure to itself. When we came within speaking distance, I said, “Hullo, Jack! You look very pleased with yourself; what is it?”

“I believe,” he answered, with a modest smile of triumph, “I
believe
I have proved that the Renaissance never happened in England.
Alternatively
”—he held up his hand to prevent my astonished exclamation—“that if it did,
it had no importance
!”

In May 1928, he told Barfield his plan: he was starting a book on
The Romance of the Rose
“and its school.” “I have actually begun the first chapter,” he told his father in July 1928, of a study that would look at “mediaeval love poetry and the mediaeval idea of love which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it: for on the one hand it is extremely super-sensual and refined and on the other it is an absolute point of honour that the lady should be some one else’s wife…” The seven years the book took to complete coincided with Lewis’s “Great War” with Owen Barfield, his journey from atheism to the threshold of Christianity (“I … wrote nearly the whole of the
Allegory
book while I was still an agnostic,” he told the critic George Watson), his first meetings with Tolkien, and his belated efforts to forge an adult relationship with his father.

Lewis’s aim in
The Allegory of Love
was “rehabilitation.” He sought to recover “that long-lost state of mind for which the allegorical love poem was a natural mode of expression.” Unearthing its classical and early medieval antecedents, he traced the form to its high-water mark in
The Faerie Queene
of Edmund Spenser, the sixteenth-century poet Lewis called “the greatest among the founders of that romantic conception of marriage which is the basis of all our love literature from Shakespeare to Meredith.” His canvas was vast, encompassing the structure of medieval narrative poetry, the dream-vision genre, the origins of romantic love, the ethos of chivalry, the moral psychology embodied in medieval lists of the virtues and vices—virtually, the whole late-antique and medieval cosmos. His interest in these matters was neither nostalgic (Lewis condemned “that itch for ‘revival’”) nor merely antiquarian. “Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.” Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind: the history of a period (medieval), a rhetorical practice (allegory), and an ethos (courtly love), which had something important to contribute to modern culture if only they could be better understood.

It would be difficult to overstate the significance of his achievement. Not alone, but with decisive impact, he opened a new era in the study of medieval literature and culture. Reading medieval and Renaissance poetry with generous sympathy, he was able to see—and convincingly show—that it expressed a philosophical worldview, with pagan as well as Christian roots, as profound and viable as anything ancient or modern civilization had to offer. He did indeed, and lastingly, “rehabilitate” Spenser, making
The Faerie Queene
morally meaningful to readers who had hitherto viewed it as an intriguing political period-piece. He also offered groundbreaking if not unassailable insights into the origin of romantic love.

We moderns, Lewis points out in
The Allegory of Love
, are conditioned to believe that romantic love—“the love interest”—is essential to literature, drama, and film; we take it for granted, even as formal courtesy erodes and sexual liberties expand, that romantic love has the power to ennoble and inspire. What we don’t recognize, Lewis maintains
,
is that we owe our exalted vision of love to a small group of medieval poets whose transformation of both pagan and early Christian eros opened a new spiritual epoch: