The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (57 page)

All the while, the Inklings continued to attract new members. In 1947, C. E. Stevens, historian, fellow of Magdalen, and a warm, rambunctious figure—a born Inkling, by all accounts—joined the group. Stevens had worked for British intelligence during the war and had conceived the brilliant notion of using the celebrated opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth,
da da da daa
, which also happens to spell “V” (for Victory) in Morse code, as the BBC’s propaganda theme. He, Lewis, and Warnie had been friends for years, but he had never been invited to the Thursday night gatherings, perhaps because his war work often took him away from the university. Lewis finally proposed Stevens’s membership at a meeting on October 23, 1947, to general acclamation. It was “the smallest Inkling we have had for a long time,” Warnie noted significantly—only he, his brother, Tolkien, and Havard attended—and the beverage was green tea. Clearly, change was in the air. The following Thursday, the same core group showed up. Stevens finally appeared on November 27 and made a good impression; “A very pleasant meeting,” declared Warnie. Other small pleasures arrived as well. Dr. Warfield M. Firor, a renowned surgeon at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University and an admirer of Lewis’s writings, began to send him ham and other delicacies to alleviate the postwar food rationing. On March 11, 1948, these gifts resulted in a grand Inklings assembly, featuring not only Dr. Firor’s ham but fillet of sole, p
â
t
é
, soup, and assorted wines. For Warnie, at least, the feast was a brilliant success, “which I enjoyed as much as anything of the sort I have ever attended … We sat down eight to dinner, all in the highest spirits … There was just the right amount of everything, including drink.” The somewhat inebriated celebrants sent a “Ham Testimonial” to the good doctor, inscribed by all—the core four plus Christopher Tolkien, Dyson, Cecil, and Hardie. Dinner completed, the party raffled off a tuxedo, a gift from yet another overseas fan. For one night, at least, it was just like old times.

Beneath the bonhomie, however, tensions festered. Five or six weeks before the Ham Testimonial, Tolkien had sent to Lewis a long letter that amounted to an apologia—in the dual sense of apology and justification—for having disparaged an unspecified work by Lewis read aloud at an Inklings meeting. The attack had upset Lewis greatly, and the two had exchanged letters on the subject. Tolkien piles up the mea culpas: “I regret causing pain, even if and in so far as I had the right; and I am very sorry indeed still for having caused it quite excessively and unnecessarily … I have been possessed on occasions (few, happily) with a sort of
furor scribendi
, in which the pen finds the words rather than head or heart; and this was one of them.” This bald apology seems to discomfit him, however, for he adds notes of defense (he had not realized at the time that Lewis was offended), attack (Lewis reads too much and too analytically), and presumptuous advice (Lewis’s suffering “will do good rather than harm, but that is between you and God. It is one of the mysteries of pain that it is, for the sufferer, an opportunity for good, a path of ascent however hard”). He then backtracks, advancing into Williamsian territory by asking Lewis to “do me the great generosity of making me a present of the pains I have caused, so that I may share in the good you have put them to.” This is the sort of behest that one can only make of someone who shares one’s deepest beliefs, a friend to whom one can confess one’s sorrows, and this is just what he does, revealing that he is “suffering … from ‘suppressed composition’” and is in consequence a “savage creature, a soreheaded bear.” It is a tender moment; the comradeship he feels for Lewis is palpable. Yet he wraps up the letter on a note of aggressive jocularity that undercuts the closeness: “But I warn you, if you bore me, I shall take my revenge … I sometimes conceive and write other things than verses or romance! And I may come back at you.” The bright flash of exposed nerve is unmistakable.

Dyson’s Roar

The tensions between Inklings had many causes. One of them showed up at almost every meeting: the ever vexatious Hugo Dyson, who relished any opportunity to create a ruckus. Recently, Dyson had broadcast the rumor that Tolkien disliked Lewis’s boisterousness during meetings. “Nay!” Tolkien assured Lewis. “That is largely a self-defensive rumour put about by Hugo. If it has any basis (for him), it is but that noise begets noise.” Warnie noted Dyson’s loudness in his diary for March 4: “Hugo’s voice 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.” Tolkien was right in his assessment, for Dyson was the clangorous provocateur at Inklings gatherings. He bristled at anything he disliked, most notably
The Lord of the Rings
; Christopher Tolkien has described him as “lying on the couch, and lolling and shouting and saying, ‘Oh God, no more Elves’”—a bowdlerization of the funnier, more devastating, and more Dysonesque actual jibe, usually given as “Oh God, not another fucking elf!” Eventually, Dyson bullied his way into the censor’s seat and managed to ban all readings of
Lord
while he was present. One should add, in his favor, that he was not the only Inkling who disapproved of Tolkien’s epic: Barfield put it aside unfinished, and John Wain poured on the scorn: “When Tolkien came through the door at a meeting of the Inklings with a bulging jacket pocket, I winced because I knew we were in for a slab of Gandalf and Bilbo Baggins and the rest of it. I wished him no harm, but would have preferred him to keep his daydreams within bounds and not inflict them on us.”

Dyson, despite his knack for obnoxiousness, was generally liked for his conviviality and wit, and he and Tolkien had been allies, not least in the late-night discussion along Addison’s Walk that had led to Lewis’s conversion. His disapprobation stung Tolkien deeply. “I remember this very vividly, my father’s pain, his shyness, which couldn’t take Hugo’s extremely rumbustious approach,” recalled Christopher. Lewis intervened whenever possible to soften the blow, shouting, “Shut up, Hugo … Come on Tollers,” but it did little good. Dyson got his way. The source of his rudeness is not hard to discern: his mind outran his manners. To Warnie, who adored him for his humor (and because a day with Dyson meant a day with drink), he gave “the impression of being made of quick silver: he pours himself into a room on a cataract of words and gestures, and you are caught up in the stream.” Dyson would seize any opening for a quip; one evening he and Warnie downed some glasses of sherry at the Mitre Tap and then walked to the courtyard, where they saw a boy slip on the cobbles. “Don’t do that, my boy: it hurts you and distresses us,” Dyson shouted. His humor and impudence went hand in hand:

Councillor Brewer arrived [at the King’s Arms Pub] and put his vast bulk in the chair facing Hugo across the table: it was plain that Hugo had never spoken to him before, but he leant forward and addressed him with an almost servile deference—“you will pardon the liberty, Sir; I trust you don’t think I presume: but I shall call you Fred. You look the sort of man who ought to be called Fred.” This the Councillor took well, and conversation became general: but a minute later, Hugo, gazing intently at his huge pale face, broke in again—“You’ll excuse me sir, but am I looking at your full face or your profile?”

Dyson’s rudeness was a slow-acting poison. First it amused, then it exasperated, finally it destroyed. His aggressiveness intensified with the years; by 1949, Warnie noted in his diary that “at a ham supper in J’s rooms, H bellows uninterruptedly for about three minutes, and as he shows no signs 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 kept the conversation
general
.’” One detects in this remark, as in Dyson’s overall antics, both insecurity and envy. His genius lay in idle repartee and back-slapping friendship rather than scholarly pursuits. He published but a handful of notable books:
Pope: Poetry and Prose
;
Augustans and Romantics
(coauthored with John Butts); and
The Emergence of Shakespeare’s Tragedy
. The introduction to his Pope anthology is telling; he singles out the poet’s “freshness and vigour of execution,” his “colour and movement,” and, in regard to his greatest work,
The Rape of the Lock
, its tone of “sophisticated malice-flecked delight,” all attributes of Dyson’s own persona. When
Augustans and Romantics
appeared, Lewis remarked, “It is, as one would expect, almost too bright, but some of the sparks are admirable”—a splendid summing up of Dyson’s gestalt. Others, too, admired Dyson’s writings, but he never attained the popular acclaim poured so lavishly upon other Inklings. In the mid-1960s, he appeared in the John Schlesinger film
Darling
as a celebrated author, a white-haired owlish man with clever, shifting eyes, tossing off bons mots of which the most memorable is “It’s true I have always preferred to be a mouse off by itself rather than a member of a group of literary lions.” The line carries a full measure of truth: Dyson, although a key member of the pride, often stood apart, too prickly and insecure (like all who demand their own way) to mesh perfectly with others. His contrariness exacted its price: when he vetoed
The Lord of the Rings
, it was no longer a case of Inklings against the world, but of Inkling against Inkling, another stage in the breaking of the circle.

15

MIRACLES

Some people believe in God because they believe in miracles; other people believe in miracles because they believe in God. Lewis was the latter sort. Miracles made sense to him only after he had embraced a God who transcends the natural order. Once he became a Christian, however, he began to notice that believer and nonbeliever alike say very odd things about miracles, as if there are only two positions one can take, credulity or skepticism. In 1942, in the first of two talks on the subject for an Evensong “Voices of the Laity” series at the London church of Saint Jude-on-the-Hill, Lewis proposed a third possibility: a rational belief in miracles supported by careful philosophical inquiry.

The following year, Dorothy L. Sayers wrote to him wondering why there weren’t any books about miracles that could help her fend off the objections of an atheist correspondent: “Has Physics sold the pass? Or is it merely that everybody is thinking in terms of Sociology and international Ethics? Please tell me what to do with this relic of the Darwinian age who is wasting my time, sapping my energies, and destroying my soul.” Lewis answered immediately with a copy of his first “Voices of the Laity” talk, and he assured Sayers that a book on the subject was in the works. He completed it in May 1945 and published it under the title of
Miracles: A Preliminary Study
two years later, by which time he had also produced the essay “Meditation in a Toolshed” and addressed Magdalen College (
“De Futilitate”
) and the Socratic Club (“Is Theology Poetry?” and “A Christian Reply to Professor Price”) on the same theme.

Lewis’s intent in writing
Miracles
was not to justify indiscriminate belief in spiritual prodigies, for which a healthy skepticism can often be the better part of piety, but to defend miracles against the naturalist who automatically and hence unphilosophically rules claims of the miraculous out of court. The locus classicus for the naturalistic view that he wished to combat is the essay “Of Miracles” in
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
by the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. A miracle, according to Hume, is “a violation of the laws of nature,” and we can never possess evidence for such a violation strong enough to outweigh our “firm and unalterable experience” of nature’s regularity.

But a miracle need not be seen as a
violation
of nature’s laws, Lewis points out; indeed, that is not how Christian philosophers have traditionally understood the matter. Rather, a miracle interrupts or invades the system of nature, without disrupting its fundamental laws. The naturalist thinks he knows in advance that such an invasion can never occur, because nature is “the whole show.” But for the supernaturalist—that is, for anyone who admits a reality beyond the system of nature—the portcullis is open. On a supernaturalist account, miracles
might
occur. Whether they really do is a matter for further investigation.

Odd as it may seem at first glance, Lewis sets out to justify this supernaturalist account by an appeal, not to revelation or religious experience, but to reason alone. To the naturalist, he observes, logical thinking is a useful behavior evolved, like all behaviors, under the influence of irrational causes; as such, Lewis argues, it has no purchase on objective truth. Nothing can shield naturalism itself from being explained naturalistically, so that, judged by its own criteria, naturalism self-destructs. This, at least, is the way Lewis put it in the third chapter of the original 1947 edition of
Miracles
on “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist”:

… no account of the universe can be true unless that account leaves it possible for our thinking to be a real insight. A theory which explained everything else in the whole universe but which made it impossible to believe that our thinking was valid, would be utterly out of court. For that theory would itself have been reached by thinking, and if thinking is not valid that theory would, of course, be itself demolished. It would have destroyed its own credentials. It would be an argument which proved that no argument was sound—a proof that there are no such things as proofs—which is nonsense.

It was a Chestertonian move. In
Orthodoxy
, G. K. Chesterton had similarly observed that “evolution is either an innocent scientific description of how certain earthly things came about; or, if it is anything more than this, it is an attack upon thought itself”; more aphoristically: “the sceptics, like bees, give their one sting and die.” Lewis thought that by focusing on logical inference rather than on thought or consciousness in general, he had made the case more compelling. Barfield, for one, disagreed; in a note he inserted in his copy of
Miracles
(and may or may not have sent to Lewis), he expressed his doubt that a reasoning process that, as Lewis put it, “has grown up gradually since my birth and is interrupted for several hours each night” could secure our access to the supernatural. Supersensible cognition (of the sort Steiner experienced) is where one should look for evidence of the supernatural.