The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and Their Friends

Certainly he would always remember what he described as ‘the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses’. And just once he put something of this into his poetry:

‘What, brother, brother,

Who groaned?’ – ‘I’m hit. I’m finished. Let me be.’

– ‘Put out your hand, then. Reach me. No, the other.’

– ‘Don’t touch. Fool! Damn you! Leave me.’ – ‘I can’t see.

Where are you?’ Then more groans. ‘They’ve done for me.

I’ve no hands. Don’t come near me. No, but stay,

Don’t leave me … O my God! Is it near day?’

(These lines are from his narrative poem Dymer, written not long after the war.) Lewis himself was wounded by a shell a few months after going into the front line. But when he came to write an autobiography he devoted three heated chapters to the horrors of public school and only part of one – entitled ‘Guns and Good Company’ – to his war experiences. Two remarks about the war, in that book, sum up his attitude. After recording his memories of the animal horror of the trenches, he says: ‘It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else.’ The other remark describes his response to hearing for the first time the whine of a bullet: ‘At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.”’

*

When Jack Lewis was sent home wounded from the trenches in the spring of 1918, Mrs Moore came to London to be near his hospital. Later, he chose to convalesce in Bristol where she lived. After he had recovered and had re-entered army life, she spent the rest of the war following him from camp to camp, setting up temporary homes as near to him as possible. And when in the autumn of 1918 the war ended and he went back to Oxford as an undergraduate, she packed up her house in Bristol and came too.

They found a furnished house in Warneford Road in east Oxford, and shared the rent between them, Jack making use of an allowance from his father and Mrs Moore depending chiefly on money from her estranged husband, whom she called ‘the Beast’. Officially, Jack was living in University College where he was an undergraduate reading Classics, but in reality he spent as much time as possible in ‘our hired house’, as he described it. ‘After lunch,’ he told Arthur Greeves, ‘I work until tea, then work again until dinner. After that, a little more work, talk and laziness and sometimes bridge, then bicycle back to College at 11.I then light my fire and work or read till 12 o’clock when I retire to sleep the sleep of the just.’ This may have been his routine on an ideal day, but more often his time at Warneford Road was occupied with one of the innumerable domestic chores which Mrs Moore was in the habit of devising for him: helping her to make jam and marmalade, scrubbing the floors, washing up, walking the dog, mending broken furniture, taking messages and doing shopping errands. It was not that she did not try to do any of these things herself, but she was easily exhausted – or at least Jack believed that she was – and, though they were generally able to afford a maid, Mrs Moore was suspicious of servants and did not like to trust the girl with these tasks. She used to say of Jack, ‘He is as good as an extra maid.’ As for Jack, he developed the ability to work at his desk in the middle of domestic mayhem. Only a few minutes would pass in an afternoon at Warneford Road without Mrs Moore’s strident voice summoning him to some job or other; he would lay down his pen patiently, go and do what was wanted (however trivial) and then come back and resume work as if nothing had happened. He called this ‘the hopeless business of trying to save D. from overwork’. ‘D.’ was how he referred to Mrs Moore in his diary; to other people he called her ‘Minto’. Both names are inexplicable.

Remarkably, this disturbed way of life did no harm to his studies. Long before, in Surrey days, his tutor Kirkpatrick had reported to Jack’s father, ‘He has read more classics than any boy I ever had – or indeed I might add than any I ever heard of, unless it be an Addison or Landor or Macaulay.’ Kirkpatrick had also said of Jack’s enthusiasm for his work, ‘He is a student who has no interest except in reading and study. The very idea of urging him or stimulating him to increased exertion makes me smile.’ Nevertheless, given the distractions of life with ‘Minto’, Jack Lewis did very well to take a First Class in Classical Moderations in March 1920.

Meanwhile his friends and relatives were puzzling over his strange involvement with Mrs Moore. It was easy to explain the mother—son element in it by the losses of real mother and real son which they had suffered. But was that all? Some people perhaps suspected a romantic-sexual element in the liaison, and possibly this was what Jack’s father had in mind when he referred to it as ‘Jack’s affair’. This sort of speculation was, if anything, fostered by the silence of Jack himself, who refused to discuss the matter with any of his close friends. On the only occasion Warnie Lewis asked his brother about the relationship he was told to mind his own business. In particular Jack tried to keep his father as much in the dark about it as possible, pretending to him that he was living in ordinary ‘digs’ with other undergraduates, and disguising a holiday spent with ‘Minto’ as a walking tour with a college friend. None of this helped to make it seem entirely respectable.1

On the other hand nobody who knew Jack Lewis supposed seriously that Mrs Moore was his mistress. Certainly he discussed sex in his letters to Arthur Greeves, but only in relation to masturbation, and this was probably all that he meant by the rather veiled and arch references he made (in the books he was later to write) to his sexual experience as a young man. On the practical level, a sexual relationship with Mrs Moore would have been difficult without servants’ gossip, let alone the fact that another member of the household was Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen, who was eight years younger than Paddy and still a child.

After this strange ménage had been established in Oxford for a little over a year, Jack was able to move out of college and make the home with ‘Minto’ his official lodgings. But they were obliged to leave the Warneford Road house, and there began a long search for a permanent home in which they could use Mrs Moore’s own furniture. Unfurnished houses at a moderate rent seemed impossible to find, and for two long years they moved from one place to another, renting furnished rooms or being lent the use of a house for a few weeks while the owner was away. Between 1918 and 1923 they lived at nine different addresses, ‘most of them vile’, as Jack remarked in his diary. At one time during this period Mrs Moore told him that ‘she was quite convinced that she would never again live in a house of her own’.

*

Until 1918 Jack Lewis had gone on writing poems that were deeply pessimistic, flinging accusations at a cruel God. They were not particularly good as poetry, so he was lucky to have a volume of them published by Heinemann in 1918 under the title Spirits in Bondage. They attracted almost no attention, and Lewis brought no reputation as a poet when he came up to Oxford. Indeed, tastes were already changing, and he discovered that many of his fellow undergraduates who were interested in poetry admired T. S. Eliot and other exponents of modern verse. ‘I’m afraid I shall never be an orthodox modern,’ Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves in October 1918. ‘I like lines that will scan and do not care for descriptions of sea-sickness.’

He was not alone in disliking modern verse: he soon made friends with several other undergraduates who shared his views, and who (like him) wanted to go on writing poetry uninfluenced by the new movement. Among these was a young man at Wadham College, Owen Barfield. He and Lewis and several others conceived the rather grand idea of issuing a yearly collection of their verses; but this idea petered out. However, they continued to read each other’s poetry with interest, and to offer criticisms.

By the time that Lewis began to read for the second part of the Classics course, ‘Greats’ (Ancient History and Philosophy), he had abandoned the pessimistic viewpoint of his early poems. He also decided to turn his back on the sensations of delight that he had received from Norse mythology, Malory, George MacDonald, and many other books. Privately he still sometimes felt such sensations, though not so often as before; but these he now labelled ‘aesthetic experience’ and said that they were valuable but not really informative. As to the existence of God, he adopted the attitude that ‘it really made no difference whatever whether there was such a person or no’. All this he called his New Look. It certainly harmonised with the Oxford approach to philosophy at the time; the ruthlessly analytical Logical Positivism had not yet made its appearance, but there was a prevailing tone of scepticism which Lewis gladly adopted.

In 1922 he took a First Class in ‘Greats’.

*

Shortly after this, he and Mrs Moore finally found a house that offered a hope of permanence, ‘Hillsboro’, a villa in the Oxford suburb of Headington which was available as an unfurnished letting. Out came Mrs Moore’s furniture from store; Jack spent endless days painting and laying linoleum; and they moved in. This, however, did not mean domestic tranquillity, for ‘Minto’ still found more than enough for Jack to do, partly thanks to her habit of quarrelling with servants. Jack noted in his diary that the incompetence of one maid had become ‘the exclusive subject of conversation’ with Mrs Moore, remarking, ‘I do not blame D. for this in the least, but of course it makes things very miserable.’

Jack now hoped for a teaching appointment at Oxford. But there were no university jobs available in Philosophy, his strong subject in ‘Greats’; so, as his father was good-naturedly prepared to continue financial support for a time, he decided to read English Language and Literature, tackling the full course in just one year, a mere third of the time that most undergraduates devoted to it. This meant learning Anglo-Saxon and studying the principles of philology, besides reading literature from the medieval period to the nineteenth century. He was, of course, far from ignorant in this field already, but there was still a lot of ground to cover, and it was amazing that he managed to do it in the moments he could spare from domestic life. During the months while he was racing through the English syllabus he was teaching Latin to Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen and to her music-mistress in lieu of Maureen’s fees, tutoring a neighbour’s child in return for Maureen’s lessons with its mother, and washing up after almost every meal. For two weeks he was, by day and night, looking after Mrs Moore’s brother, who was having a severe nervous breakdown in the house. He was also coping with a perpetual series of what he called ‘Minto’s mare’s nests’ – imaginary crises of every conceivable kind – and with a stream of visitors and paying guests. The most remarkable thing was that he did this with almost unvarying good humour. This was perhaps partly because he knew that the whole thing was very nearly his fault anyway, and if he complained it could be justly retorted that the household owed its existence to him. But really it was his immense fund of good nature that kept him going. He was already practised at coping with domestic oddities, thanks to the strangeness of family life with his father in Belfast; and in any case he was not a complainer by nature. Far from it: he derived immense amusement from the odd visitors who came to the house, to whom he and Mrs Moore gave nicknames: ‘the Blackguard’ for a grotesque French lodger, and ‘Smudge’ for the inoffensive and rather indistinct music teacher. Only when the question was raised of his brother Warnie coming to live with them did Jack warn him openly of ‘the perpetual interruptions of family life – the partial loss of liberty’. And even then he qualified it by adding: ‘This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it: but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. Whether I was right or wrong, wise or foolish, to have done so originally, is now only an historical question: once having created expectations, one naturally fulfils them.’

*

He was not very impressed by his first experiences when reading English Language and Literature at Oxford. ‘The atmosphere of the English school’, he wrote in his diary after attending a lecture, ‘is very different from that of Greats. Women, Indians, and Americans predominate and – I can’t say how – one feels a certain amateurishness in the talk and look of the people.’ He thought poorly of many of the lectures, and felt no enthusiasm for the study of philological niceties such as glottal stops and vowel shifts, of which he remarked, ‘Very good stuff in its way, but why physiology should form part of the English school I really don’t know.’ He was comfortable, however, in the company of the Martlets, the literary society of University College, which met to listen to papers read by its members. Lewis often contributed monographs on his favourite authors. He gave a talk on William Morris and another on Spenser. After the paper there would be a discussion, which sometimes turned into intellectual pyrotechnics; for like Lewis many of the Martlets were well read in philosophy. They enjoyed showing off their command of logic, as did Lewis, for he believed that his mind was well trained in argument. He was always in the forefront of any dialectical battle that concluded a Martlets evening, and he also liked to go for brisk walks with fellow members, during which they would continue an intricate argument from the previous Martlets meeting. This kind of talk was often an intellectual duel for the sake of the sport, and Lewis judged his and his opponent’s performance as much on method as on content. ‘In spite of many well contested points I was gravelled in the end,’ he recorded after one such contest which was conducted while he and a friend strode across the meadows on the edge of Oxford, adding, ‘We were neither of us in really good dialectical form.’

It was not only among the Martlets that he engaged in logical argument. It was indeed a form of conversation that he sought wherever it could be found, not least perhaps because it was a relief from Mrs Moore’s illogical chatter; and he judged his acquaintances by their capacity for it, despising men who talked only in anecdotes or merely peddled facts. Nor did he care for men who were flippant or cynical. To get on with Lewis you had to argue with feeling as well as with your brain; you had to hold your opinions passionately and be prepared to defend them with logic. Not surprisingly, few people came up to the mark.

One who did was a fellow Irishman, Nevill Coghill, who like Lewis was reading the English course in one year, having previously graduated in History. Each found the other a good companion for energetic country walks, and while striding together over Hinksey Hill they would talk excitedly about what they had been reading that week. Coghill never forgot how on one such walk Lewis, who had just encountered the Anglo-Saxon Battle of Maldon, boomed out some lines from the end of the poem:

‘Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,

mod sceal þe mare, þe ure maegen lytlað.’

‘Will shall be the sterner, heart the bolder, spirit the greater as our strength lessens.’

In the summer of 1923 Lewis was awarded a First Class in the English School He now had three Firsts to his name, and was determined to get an academic job, but the days were over when a clever young man could walk out of examinations into a college fellowship. There was plenty of competition and few jobs. Certainly Lewis had a wider choice than some men, for he could teach Philosophy as well as English Literature, but even so there were not many opportunities. For a year he could find nothing at all and, though his father generously continued to pay an allowance despite his suspicions (or perhaps because of his ignorance) about Jack’s life with Mrs Moore, it was a worrying time. Jack occupied himself by reading and by writing poetry. He was now at work on a long narrative poem which he called Dymer, about a young man who escapes from a totalitarian society, begets a monster on an unseen and mysterious bride, and is eventually killed by the monster, which becomes a god. Lewis declared that he had no idea what its meaning might be. ‘Everyone may allegorise or psychoanalyse it as he pleases,’ he said; and certainly one episode in the poem does seem to relate closely to his own life at the time of its composition. When Dymer wakes after his night of love in the dark room with the unseen girl, he wanders out into the daylight and explores the mysterious palace in which he has found her. After a few moments he returns to seek her, but the way to the room is now blocked by the witch-like shape of an old woman squatting on the threshold. Whichever way Dymer takes through the corridors, still the way is barred by this ‘old, old matriarchal dreadfulness’, so that in the end he is forced to leave the palace and abandon his lover, whom he never sees again. When Lewis began to write Dymer in 1922 he had been living with Mrs Moore for three years, and now that she had come into his life he took no further romantic interest in girls of his own age.

Dymer was more contemporary in tone than Lewis’s 1918 anthology, being rather in the style of John Masefield. While Lewis was working on it, he often showed the manuscript to his undergraduate friend Owen Barfield. Barfield was generally very complimentary about the poem, and when he showed his own verse to Lewis he received equal praise.

Barfield, too, graduated with a First in English, and then tried to earn a living by contributing to London literary journals. Meanwhile Nevill Coghill, was awarded a fellowship at Exeter College, where he had been an undergraduate. Lewis himself continued to wait, applying for several jobs without success. After a year the position improved when he was given some part-time work teaching Philosophy at University College for a don who was temporarily in America. Then in the spring of 1925 a fellowship in English Language and Literature was advertised at Magdalen College. Lewis applied, though without much hope.

The weeks that followed were anxious. He continued to give tutorials and lectures at University College, generally walking home afterwards to save the bus fares. His afternoons spent striding across the Oxfordshire countryside with friends like Coghill had made him a practised walker, and the mere mile and a quarter from the town to Headington was nothing to him. He could be seen on most days, coming down the steps from the main entrance of his college, a heavily built young man with a florid face and a flop of dark hair, dressed in baggy flannel trousers and an old blazer with a University College badge, and wearing a battered hat and a shabby mackintosh if the weather was not warm. ‘Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me,’ he noted one morning. ‘One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer “Heavy Lewis”.’

On 22 May 1925 The Times announced that ‘The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and Literature, for five years as from next June 25, Mr Clive Staples Lewis.’

*

Lewis settled into his new college during the Long Vacation of 1925. He had been allocated rooms in the eighteenth-century New Buildings, with windows overlooking the tower and lawns on one side and the Grove with its herd of deer on the other. Few people in Oxford had a finer view. Lewis reported to his father that it was ‘beautiful beyond compare’.

By the time the Michaelmas term began he had bought the few pieces of furniture necessary for his rooms, choosing the very plainest because he did not think that such things mattered much. In fact he could have afforded a few extravagances, had they been to his taste, for he would have a good income from the fellowship and plenty of security. The appointment at Magdalen was nominally for five years only, but fellows were almost always re-elected when that period was over. It would only be necessary to keep on good terms with the other Magdalen dons and to do his job fairly conscientiously to be secure for the rest of his working days.

The snag was that one of these conditions – keeping on good terms with his colleagues – did not look as if it was going to be particularly easy. Some of them seemed pleasant enough; he liked and admired Frank Hardie, a don of about the same age as himself;1 but he could not come to the same opinion about many of the others. ‘I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues,’ he told his father. ‘There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever suspected possible: and what worries me most of all is that the decent men seem to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time).’ Among the older men were P. V. M. Benecke, the Ancient History tutor, and J. A. Smith, the moral philosopher, both of them Victorians in ideas as well as appearance. Lewis took to having his breakfast with them, partly as a way of avoiding the younger dons. To a couple of these he responded with horrified fascination. Of one, the historian H. M. D. Parker, he wrote in his diary: ‘He thinks of himself as a plain man with no nonsense about him, and hopes that even his enemies regard him as an honest fellow at bottom. The desire to be always exercising this shrewd practical commonsense leads him to endless discussions on everything that happens: he will draw anyone who listens into a corner and stand there exchanging husky confidences about his pupils and colleagues. He always implies that “we two (or three or four) are the only people in College who understand this matter and we must hold together”. The very same people against whom he marshals his confidants on Wednesday will themselves be taken into council on Thursday. He believes all that he says for the moment, but being weak as water, takes a new colour from every group that he falls into.’ In sharp contrast was another of the younger dons at Magdalen, T. D. (‘Harry’) Weldon, the Philosophy tutor, who was a militant atheist and who soon became the leader of the more radical dons. Of him, Lewis wrote: ‘He has great abilities, but would despise himself if he wasted them on disinterested undertakings. He would be capable of treachery and would think the victim a fool for being betrayed. He preaches what he practises: tells you openly that anyone who believes another is a fool, and holds that Hobbes alone saw the truth: tells me I am an incurable romantic and is insolent to old men and servants. He is very pale, this man, good-looking, and drinks a great deal without getting drunk. I think he is the best of our younger fellows and I would sign his death-warrant to-morrow, or he mine, without turning a hair.’

When term began, Lewis’s duties in Magdalen consisted of giving an hour’s tutorial each week, together with any extra teaching he thought necessary, to those undergraduates in the college who were reading English In his first years as a tutor he rarely had more than half a dozen pupils; and as they came to him either singly or in pairs for their tutorials, this meant some six or eight hours of teaching a week. In addition to this he gave courses of lectures to the University as a whole, which meant another hour or two’s work each week, plus the time taken to prepare the lectures. In some academic years he would also be required to serve as an examiner, which occupied a good deal of time. But much of his day was still his own, to use as he liked for private research, for helping Mrs Moore with domestic chores (which he continued to do each afternoon), and for meeting his friends.

Lewis did not find the Magdalen undergraduates much more attractive than many of the dons. He told his father that in his opinion the college was no more than ‘a country club for all the idlest “bloods” of Eton and Charterhouse’, adding, ‘I really don’t know what gifts the public schools bestow on their nurslings, beyond the mere surface of good manners: unless contempt of the things of the intellect, extravagance, insolence, self-sufficiency, and sexual perversion are to be called gifts.’ Certainly there was a Magdalen tradition of recruiting undergraduates from the smarter public schools; but here again, Lewis’s own schooling had left him sensitive to such things, particularly to homosexuality.