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

*

Was Lewis an Ulster Protestant? In Surprised by Joy he denies that he had been brought up in any particularly puritanical form of religion, and he was very angry when a Catholic publisher who reissued The Pilgrim’s Regress identified ‘Puritania’ with Ulster. ‘My father’, declared Lewis, ‘was, by nineteenth-century and Church of Ireland standards, rather “high”.’ However, his diary of life at Wynyard School, written when he was ten years old, gives a rather different impression:

We were obliged to go to St John’s (Watford), a church which wanted to be Roman Catholic, but was afraid to say so. A kind of church abhorred by respectful [sic] Irish Protestants. In this abominable place of Romish hypocrites and English liars, the people cross themselves, bow to the Lord’s Table (which they have the vanity to call an altar), and pray to the Virgin.

Twenty-two years later when Lewis resumed the practice of religion he was still rather evangelical in his approach, making his Communion only at major festivals and generally preferring to attend Matins. After a time he increased his frequency of Communion to monthly intervals. Eventually he adopted the habit of communicating weekly and on major saints’ days. Indeed as the years passed he became distinctly more ‘Catholic’ in his practices. He began to make regular confessions, and came to believe in the importance of prayers for departed souls. Yet these things did not play a large part in his religious thought, or at least not in his Christian writings, where he rarely discussed them. Indeed, he tried to avoid anything that would classify him as ‘Anglo-Catholic’ or ‘Evangelical’. He hated such terms and maintained that to say that you were High Church or Low Church was to be wickedly schismatical.

For him, the real distinction lay elsewhere, not between High and Low at all but between religious belief that was orthodox and supernatural on the one hand, and ‘liberal’ and ‘demythologised’ on the other. He had been on a long journey before he arrived at Christianity, and now that he had arrived he was determined to accept the traditional doctrines of the Church; he wanted not to argue about them or to reinterpret them but to defend them. As a result he was highly critical of the ‘broad church’ as he called it, the liberalism which he believed to be the canker in modern Christianity. Among the targets for attack in The Pilgrim’s Regress is ‘Mr Broad’, who though a ‘Steward’ (a clergyman) doubts the necessity of actual conversion. ‘I wouldn’t for the world hold you back,’ he tells John. ‘At the same time there is a very real danger at your age of trying to make these things too definite. These great truths need reinterpretation in every age.’ Lewis thought he saw this attitude growing in the contemporary church, and he took a stand firmly in opposition. For him, the great truths did not need reinterpretation. They needed to be championed, to be defended as much against ‘liberalisers’ as against unbelievers. In this attitude he was in agreement with two ultra-orthodox defenders of the faith, G. K. Chesterton, whose apologetic writings had been an influence on him during his conversion, and Tolkien.

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He had hoped that Lewis too might become a Catholic, and he was disappointed that he had returned to membership of the Church of England (the equivalent of the Church of Ireland in which Lewis had been baptised). Tolkien was strongly unsympathetic towards the Church of England, not least because during his childhood his own mother, a Catholic convert, had been treated harshly by relatives who belonged to it – indeed he believed that this ‘persecution’ had hastened her death. As a result he was particularly sensitive to any shade of anti-Catholic prejudice.

Unfortunately Lewis retained more than a trace of the Belfast Protestant attitude to Catholics. In unguarded moments he and his brother Warnie might refer to Irish Catholics as ‘bog-trotters’ or ‘bograts’, and, though they usually avoided such crude remarks in Tolkien’s presence, there were moments of tension. ‘We were coming down the steps from Magdalen hall,’ Tolkien recalled, ‘long ago in the days of our unclouded association, before there was anything, as it seemed, that must be withheld or passed over in silence. I said that I had a special devotion to St John. Lewis stiffened, his head went back, and he said in the brusque harsh tones which I was later to hear him use again when dismissing something he disapproved of: “I can’t imagine any two persons more dissimilar.” We stumped along the cloisters, and I followed feeling like a shabby little Catholic caught by the eye of an “Evangelical clergyman of good family”1 taking holy water at the door of a church. A door had slammed. Never now should I be able to say in his presence:

Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and Jon,

Thise am the grounde of alle my blysse

– The Pearl, 383-4; a poem that Lewis disliked2 – and suppose that I was sharing anything of my vision of a great rood-screen through which one could see the Holy of Holies.’

Tolkien wrote this thirty years later, when other events had soured his recollections. In the early days of the friendship such moments were rare, and for the most part he was profoundly grateful for Lewis’s conversion. In October 1933 he wrote in his diary that friendship with Lewis, ‘besides giving constant pleasure and comfort, has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual – a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher – and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord’.

*

‘On Saturday last, I started to say my prayers again after having discontinued doing so for more years than I care to remember: this was no sudden impulse, but the result of a conviction of the truth of Christianity which has been growing on me for a considerable time.’

This was written not by Jack Lewis but by his brother Warnie. During the months when Jack was returning to Christianity, Warnie too was resuming the religious beliefs and practices of his childhood. Like Jack he had in boyhood drifted away from the Church. Now in 1931 his return to Christianity was different in manner from his brother’s. He indulged in few philosophical speculations, merely recording in his diary that his new-found belief was ‘a conviction for which I admit I should be hard put to find a logical proof, but which rests on the inherent improbability of the whole of existence being fortuitous, and the inability of the materialists to provide any convincing explanation of the origin of life’.

While he was at home at the Kilns early in 1931, Warnie went to Matins at the local church with Jack. But the brothers scarcely discussed their changing views, and soon afterwards Warnie was posted to Shanghai for his final months of army service. It was there, and without any knowledge that his brother was doing the same, that he made his Communion for the first time for many years on Christmas Day 1931. A few weeks later a letter from Jack reported that he too had made his Communion on that day. ‘I am delighted,’ Warnie wrote in his diary. ‘Had he not done so I, with my altered views, would have found – hardly a barrier between us, but a lack of complete identity of interest which I should have regretted.’ Jack, when he learnt of Warnie’s full return to Christianity, made the same comment: ‘What a mercy that the change in his views (I mean as regards religion) should have happened in time to meet mine – it would be awkward if one of us were still in the old state of mind.’

The brothers’ new ‘identity of interest’ was reflected when, after Warnie’s retirement from the army and his return to the Kilns as a permanent member of the household, the two of them almost immediately set off on a walking tour, their first together, up the Wye Valley. Warnie, despite his army training, was nervous about carrying a heavy pack for twenty miles or more a day, but he was soon being pleasantly surprised at the ease of it all, and at the end of their journey he judged it to be one of the best holidays he had ever had. This was in January 1933, and for many years afterwards a January walking tour was a regular fixture for the two brothers, quite independent of Jack’s annual walk with Barfield and the other friends of that set, which usually took place just after Easter. Warnie and Jack were at their happiest on these walks, talking about anything from beer to theology. ‘We discussed’, Warnie noted in January 1935 when he and Jack were walking in the Chilterns, ‘how useful it would be if there were a beer map of England, showing the areas controlled by each Beer Baron.’ Another day they argued about the nature of personal immortality. Warnie was less well-read than Jack, but with his speculative imagination and his common sense he was an excellent companion for his brother.

At home too they spent a lot of time together. In term, Jack now slept in his college rooms, partly so that he could go to chapel early in the morning and begin work immediately after breakfast. (Mrs Moore declared herself to be an atheist and was inclined to mock at the brothers’ return to Christianity.) But in the afternoons Jack came out to the Kilns, where he and Warnie took the family dogs for a walk, or worked in the garden, rebuilding paths and planting saplings, which they called ‘public works’. Warnie had a bedroom at the Kilns, but he kept most of his books in Magdalen, in one of his brother’s two sitting-rooms; and he usually spent the morning there, sorting out and typing transcripts of the Lewis family papers, a task that took him several years. In fact it became his chief occupation, for his army pension together with small private means meant that he did not need to take a paid job. He was able to spend much of his time going to concerts, and reading, which he did a great deal. He also got to know Jack’s friends when they dropped in at Magdalen.

He was typing one morning in February 1933 when (he wrote in his diary) ‘in came J’s friend Dyson from Reading – a man who gives 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 – but after the first plunge, it is exhilarating. I was swept along by him to the Mitre Tap in the Turl (a distinct discovery this, by the way) where we had two glasses of Bristol Milk apiece and discussed China, Japan, staff officers, Dickens, house property as an investment, and, most utterly unexpected, “Your favourite reading’s Orlando Furioso isn’t it?” (deprecatory gesture as I got ready to deny this). “Sorry! Sorry! my mistake.” As we left the pub, a boy came into the yard and fell on the cobbles. Dyson (appealingly): “Don’t do that my boy: it hurts you and distresses us.”’

Hugo Dyson, on his visits to Oxford from Reading, became a frequent and most welcome interrupter of Warnie Lewis’s mornings: ‘At about half past eleven when I was at work in the front room in College, in burst Dyson in his most exuberant mood. He began by saying that it was such a cold morning that we would have to adjourn almost immediately to get some brandy. I pointed out to him that if he was prepared to accept whiskey as an alternative, it was available in the room. Having sniffed it he observed “it would be unpardonable rudeness to your brother to leave any of this” and emptied the remains of the decanter into the glass. After talking very loudly and amusingly for some quarter of an hour, he remarked airily “I suppose we can’t be heard in the next room?” then having listened for a moment, “Oh, it’s all right, it’s the pupil talking – your brother won’t want to listen to him anyway”. He next persuaded me to walk round to Blackwell’s with him, and here he was the centre of attraction to a crowd of undergraduates. Walking up to the counter he said: “I want a second hand so-and-so’s Shakespeare; have you got one?” The assistant: “Not a second hand one, sir, I’m afraid.” Dyson (impatiently): “Well, take a copy and rub it on the floor, and sell it to me as shop soiled.”’

*

Tolkien too was a regular caller while Warnie Lewis was at work in Magdalen. He and Jack were in the habit of spending an hour together on Monday mornings, generally concluding their conversation with a pint of beer in the Eastgate Hotel opposite the college. ‘This is one of the pleasantest spots in the week,’ remarked Jack. ‘Sometimes we talk English School politics; sometimes we criticize one another’s poems; other days we drift into theology or “the state of the nation”; rarely we fly no higher than bawdy or puns.’

By ‘bawdy’ Lewis meant not obscene stories but rather old-fashioned barrack-room jokes and songs and puns. For example, he greatly relished one of his pupils’ perfectly serious description of courtly love as ‘a vast medieval erection’, and in meetings of the Coalbiters he and the other members of that club listened with delight to scurrilous jests composed in Icelandic by Tolkien, who was a past master of bawdy in several languages. Lewis believed that to be acceptable, bawdy ‘must have nothing cruel about it. It must not approach anything near the pornographic. Within these limits I think it is a good and wholesome genre.’

As to ‘English School politics’, these became less turbulent after 1931 when – chiefly thanks to Lewis’s part in the campaign – Tolkien’s syllabus reforms were accepted by the Faculty, with the result that the Anglo-Saxon and Middle English parts of the course became much more attractive to undergraduates, and the study of Victorian literature was virtually abandoned. Lewis was delighted at this victory, which as he put it ‘my party and I have forced upon the junto after hard fighting’.

Shortly after the new syllabus was put into effect, Lewis and Tolkien were both doing duty as examiners in the English School, together with Tolkien’s friend and former colleague from Leeds, E. V. Gordon. Lewis lost no opportunity of writing a jibe in the Beowulf metre at the two philologists’ performance in the viva voce examination sessions:

Two at the table in their talk borrowed

Gargantua’s mouth. Gordon and Tolkien

Had will to repeat well-nigh the whole

That they of Verner’s law and of vowel sorrows,

Cares of consonants, and case endings,

Heard by hearsay.

Never at board I heard

Viler vivas.

‘In fact’, Tolkien remarked of these lines, ‘during the sessions C. S. L.’s voice was the one most often heard.’

Outside term time, Tolkien and Lewis sometimes went for afternoon walks together. Warnie Lewis liked to enjoy as much of his brother’s company as possible, and he was not always pleased about this. ‘Confound Tolkien!’ he wrote in his diary on one such occasion. ‘I seem to see less and less of J. every day.’ Knowing Warnie’s feelings, Jack took a great deal of trouble not to leave his brother out of anything and, when Tolkien and he decided to spend an evening reading aloud the libretto of Wagner’s Die Walküre, Warnie was asked to join them even though he knew no German and could only take part by using an English translation. They began after tea, broke off for supper at the Eastgate – ‘where we had fried fish and a savoury omelette, with beer’ – and then returned to Jack’s rooms in Magdalen ‘and finished our play (and incidentally the best part of a decanter of very inferior whiskey),’ recorded Warnie. ‘Arising from the perplexities of Wotan we had a long and interesting discussion on religion which lasted until about half past eleven.’1

Warnie was with Jack at a dinner in July 1933 when Tolkien and Hugo Dyson acted as joint hosts at Exeter College, of which they were both old members. ‘Dyson and Tolkien were in exuberant form,’ recorded Warnie. ‘I should like to have seen more of a man on the opposite side of the table, Coghill: big, pleasant, good looking.’ Later ‘the party broke up, Tolkien, Dyson, J., a little unobtrusive clergyman, and myself walking back to Magdalen where we strolled about in the grove, where the deer were flitting about in the twilight – Tolkien swept off his hat to them and remarked “Hail fallow well met”.’

There were also quite a few gatherings of this sort at which Warnie Lewis was not present. The English School ‘junto’ led by Lewis and Tolkien began to hold informal dinners. This was quite a large group, known as ‘the Cave’ and including a number of college tutors besides the nucleus of Lewis and his friends.2 Sometimes a similar group, ‘the Oyster Club’, would gather to celebrate the end of examination-marking by eating oysters. Meanwhile the Coalbiters continued to meet, until at last they had read the major Icelandic sagas and both Eddas, when they were dissolved.

Such semi-formal groups were a regular feature of Oxford life, and there was certainly nothing remarkable about them. Nor was there anything particularly notable about a literary society in which Lewis and Tolkien were both involved for a few terms. It met at University College, where Lewis still taught a few pupils (though in English Literature now, rather than Philosophy). Its founder and organiser, like most of the members, was an undergraduate, Edward Tangye Lean, who edited the university magazine Isis and published a couple of novels while still studying for his degree. There were also a few dons present at the meetings. The club existed so that members could read unpublished compositions aloud, and ask for comments and criticisms. Tangye Lean named it ‘The Inklings’.

No record of its proceedings survives, though Tolkien recalled that in its original form the club soon died, probably when Tangye Lean left Oxford in 1933 for a career in journalism and broadcasting. Tolkien also remembered that among the unpublished works read aloud at its meetings was his own poem ‘Errantry’. That poem (which begins ‘There was a merry passenger, A messenger, a mariner’) was published soon afterwards in the Oxford Magazine. Warnie Lewis read it, admired it, and declared it to be ‘a real discovery’, not least because of its unusual metre. Meanwhile Jack Lewis had recently finished reading a longer work by Tolkien. On 4 February 1933 he wrote to Arthur Greeves: ‘Since term began I have had a delightful time reading a children’s story which Tolkien has just written. I have told you of him before: the one man absolutely fitted, if fate had allowed, to be a third in our friendship in the old days, for he also grew up on W. Morris and George MacDonald. Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we would both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry.’ The story was called The Hobbit.

Tolkien had invented it partly to amuse his own children, and certainly without any serious thought of publication. He had not even bothered to finish typing out a fair copy, but had left it broken off some way before the end. Lewis, much as he liked the story, was by no means certain of the measure of Tolkien’s achievement. ‘Whether it is really good’, he remarked to Greeves, ‘is of course another question: still more, whether it will succeed with modern children.’

*

Tolkien ought, on the face of it, to have been an ideal companion for Lewis and Barfield on their walking tours. But when he did accompany them he found that twenty miles or so a day, carrying a heavy pack, was more than he liked.1 Tolkien’s own idea of a walk in the countryside involved frequent stops to examine plants or insects, and this irritated Lewis. When Tolkien spent some time at Malvern on holiday with the Lewis brothers in 1947, Warnie remarked: ‘His one fault turned out to be that he wouldn’t trot at our pace in harness; he will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and entomological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us “ruthless walkers”.’

Lewis once described an event that might be imagined to have happened on one of his and Tolkien’s rural expeditions:

We were talking of dragons, Tolkien and I

In a Berkshire bar. The big workman

Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe

All the evening, from his empty mug

With gleaming eye, glanced towards us;

‘I seen ’em myself’, he said fiercely.

The lines, however, were invented by Lewis simply as a demonstration of the alliterative metre, and Tolkien said that they had no basis in fact: ‘The occasion is entirely fictitious. A remote source of Jack’s lines may be this: I remember him telling me a story of Brightman, the distinguished ecclesiastical scholar, who used to sit quietly in Common Room (in Magdalen) saying nothing except on rare occasions. Jack said that there was a discussion on dragons one night and at the end Brightman’s voice was heard to say, “I have seen a dragon.” Silence. “Where was that?” he was asked. “On the Mount of Olives,” he said. He relapsed into silence and never before his death explained what he meant.’

*

A great part of Lewis’s time was of course taken up with giving tutorials and lectures to undergraduates. When teaching, he turned for a model to the method of his old tutor Kirkpatrick. But while ‘Kirk’s’ ways had served well in their place, they were not liked by many of the undergraduates who climbed the stairs of Magdalen New Buildings for tutorials. Lewis (though he privately found tutorials boring) was conscientiously attentive to his pupils and to the essays they read aloud to him. But he rarely praised their work, preferring to engage them in heated argument about some remark they had made. This frightened all but the toughest-minded undergraduates. A few managed to fight back and even win a point – which was just what Lewis wanted them to do – but the majority were cowed by the force of his dialectic and went away abashed.

In the lecture room his manner was less fierce. He lectured clearly in a steady, even voice, and without dramatic gestures; though when he quoted, which he did a great deal, he read superbly. Sometimes, in his ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Studies’, he actually dictated important passages word by word to his audience, while all the time he cited facts, and this was what many undergraduates wanted. Other English School dons might be more entertaining – Nevill Coghill expounded Chaucer with urbane humour, and Tolkien’s Beowulf lectures were famed for their striking recitations – but Lewis handed out information, and his lectures were very well attended for this reason.

He was becoming known as an expert in medieval literature, and his ‘Prolegomena’ lectures, setting out the background required for a study of the medieval period, were soon regarded as indispensable. In his spare time from teaching he was still at work on his study of the allegorical love-poetry of the Middle Ages. When it was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love it was greatly admired, not least for Lewis’s beautifully apt translations of medieval Latin and French poems into mock-medieval English verse of his own composition. Lewis did this to preserve the flavour of the originals, and also because he enjoyed writing pastiche. But fine as was the achievement of The Allegory of Love, he did not regard himself exclusively as a specialist in that period of literature. Indeed, as early as 1931 he had begun to take arms over a critical issue affecting the whole of English literature, an issue that was profoundly involved with his conversion to Christianity.

He believed that he saw a characteristic in literary criticism which was becoming more marked, and which disturbed him. This was the tendency for critics to discuss the personality of the writer as it could be deduced from his work, rather than the character of the writing. At best, Lewis believed, this produced a kind of pseudo-biography, at worst sheer psychological muck-raking. For example he quoted E. M. W. Tillyard saying that Paradise Lost ‘is really about the true state of Milton’s mind when he wrote it’. Lewis thought this was nonsense, and he wrote an essay attacking what he called ‘The Personal Heresy in Criticism’, declaring: ‘A poet does what no one else can do: what, perhaps, no other poet can do; but he does not express his personality.’ The essay was published in an academic journal; Tillyard replied, and a public controversy began between them.