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

Lewis’s attack was partially justified. In its extreme form this ‘biographical’ tendency in criticism is objectionable. Yet there are also grounds for supposing that Lewis’s attitude to it grew from something deep-seated in his own personality. In saying this one is of course falling into the very Personal Heresy that he attacked. Nevertheless it needs to be said.

He had always been shy of the emotions. He was aware of this himself, and he said it was because in his childhood he had been embarrassed by his father’s ups and downs of mood. In reaction he tried to cultivate a detachment from passing shades of sorrow and happiness, and to maintain a calmly cheerful exterior. Taking this one stage further, he also abstained from speculations about his own psychological make-up and that of his friends. There was of course no reason why he should speculate about his own personality. On the other hand, given his strange and perhaps inexplicable attachment to Mrs Moore, there were perhaps reasons why he should not.

This attitude was held even more deeply by him after his conversion. He managed to incorporate it into his Christianity, declaring that it was a Christian’s duty to get on with doing the will of God and not to waste time tinkering with his own psychology. ‘To know how bad we are’, he said, ‘is an excellent recipe for becoming much worse.’ His own motto for the conducting of his life was

Man, please thy Maker and be merry,

And set not by this world a cherry.

Was this deliberate lack of interest in his own personality the cause of an alteration in Lewis’s manner after his conversion? At all events Owen Barfield gradually became aware that something was happening to Lewis during this period. ‘Looking back over the last thirty years,’ Barfield wrote shortly after Lewis’s death, ‘it appears to me that I have throughout all that time been thinking, pondering, wondering, puzzling over the individual essence of my old friend. The puzzlement has had to do above all with the great change that took place in him between the years 1930 and 1940 – a change which roughly coincided with his conversion but which did not appear, and does not appear in retrospect, to be inevitably or even naturally connected with it.’

In particular Barfield noticed that, once this change had occurred, Lewis had ‘deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals’. He also observed that something a little strange was happening to Lewis’s manner as a writer.

One example in particular stuck in Barfield’s memory. After Tillyard’s rejoinder to the ‘Personal Heresy’ essay had been published, Lewis wrote a reply to that rejoinder which he called ‘An Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’. Barfield was staying at the Kilns at the time and, when Lewis handed it to him, he read it with admiration, but also (he said) ‘with a certain underlying – what is the word? – restlessness, malaise, bewilderment – that gradually increased until, when I came to the passage at the end:

As I glance through the letter again I notice that I have not been able, in the heat of argument, to express as clearly or continuously as I could have wished my sense that I am engaged with “an older and a better soldier”. But I have little fear that you will misunderstand me. We have both learnt our dialectic in the academic arena where knocks that would frighten the London literary coteries are given and taken in good part; and even where you may think me something too pert you will not suspect me of malice. If you honour me with a reply it will be in kind; and then, God defend the right!

I am, my dear Sir, with the greatest respect,

Your obedient servant,

C. S. Lewis.

‘I slapped down the book’ (Barfield continued) ‘and shouted: ‘I don’t believe it! It’s pastichel”’

It may of course have been deliberate pastiche, something that Lewis always enjoyed writing. Yet on that occasion he had no ready answer to Barfield’s accusation – or at least none that Barfield could recall thirty years later – and all through the ‘Personal Heresy’ controversy there was something in his tone that seemed just subtly artificial. He attacked the tendency of critics to exalt poets because he said it disparaged what he called ‘common things and common men’. He declared that the modern verse of the nineteen-twenties only succeeded in communicating a boredom and nausea that had little place in ‘the life of the corrected and full-grown man’. And, laughing at the notion that poets are in any sense braver than ordinary men, he asked: ‘What meditation on human fate demands so much “courage” as the act of stepping into a cold bath?’

This last remark seems more appropriate to G. K. Chesterton than to Lewis. It would not have been voiced by Lewis as a young man; he had taken the writing of poetry very seriously. But after his conversion this came more and more to be the kind of thing he said and the kind of attitude he took. Or rather, it was the kind of attitude he thought he took, or had decided to take. As Barfield expressed it, ‘It left me with the impression, not of “I say this”, but of “This is the sort of thing a man might say”.’1

It was naturally a little disturbing, not least because sometimes the old Lewis would appear again. ‘From about 1935 onwards I had the impression of living with, not one, but two Lewises,’ said Barfield. ‘There was both a friend and the memory of a friend; sometimes they were close together and nearly coalesced; sometimes they seemed very far apart.’

*

If Barfield thought that Lewis’s contribution to The Personal Heresy had something of a pose or posture about it, others observed that in the controversy Lewis took up a position that was specifically Christian. In his initial essay he declared that one of the reasons why he disliked paying too much attention to a poet’s personality was that this implied that the personality mattered, which, he said, was the sort of view held by ‘a half-hearted materialist’. He said that the modern critic failed to realise that if the materialistic view of the universe was true, then ‘personality’ was as meaningless as everything else. ‘If the world is meaningless,’ he said, ‘then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone.’

He himself of course did now believe that the universe ‘meant something’. And he did not intend to keep his Christian view of the world out of his literary criticism. If his attitude in The Personal Heresy (which was eventually published as a book) was only Christian by implication, in a short article published soon afterwards he was much more open about what he thought.

The article was called ‘Christianity and Literature’. It originated as a paper read to a religious society at Oxford, and it was printed in 1939 in Lewis’s volume of essays Rehabilitations. In it, Lewis said he found ‘a disquieting contrast between the whole circle of ideas used in modern criticism and certain ideas recurrent in the New Testament’.

‘What’, he asked, ‘are the key-words of modern criticism? Creative, with its opposite derivative; spontaneity, with its opposite convention; freedom, contrasted with rules. We certainly have a general picture of bad work flowing from conformity and discipleship, and of good work bursting out from certain centres of explosive force – apparently self-originating force – which we call men of genius.’ This, he said, was in conflict with the New Testament, where (he claimed) it is often implied that all ‘creation’ by men is at its best no more than imitation of God, and in no sense ‘original’ at all. From this he concluded that the duty of a Christian writer lies not in self-expression for its own sake, but in reflecting the image of God. ‘Applying this principle to literature,’ he said, ‘we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. Our criticism would therefore from the beginning group itself with some existing theories of poetry against others. It would have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse. It would have affinities with the Platonic doctrine of a transcendent Form partly imitable on earth; and remoter affinities with the Aristotelian doctrine of μιμησις and the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients. It would be opposed to the theory of genius as, perhaps, generally understood; and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression.’

The argument of Lewis’s ‘Christianity and Literature’ was paralleled by Tolkien’s lecture on Fairy-Stories, delivered the same year (1939) that Lewis’s essay was published. In this lecture Tolkien declared – as he had told Lewis on that September night eight years earlier – that in writing stories man is not a creator but a sub-creator who may hope to reflect something of the eternal light of God. In the lecture he quoted from the poem that he had written for Lewis, recording something of their talk that night under the trees in Addison’s Walk:

Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light

through whom is splintered from a single White

to many hues, and endlessly combined

in living shapes that move from mind to mind.

Though all the crannies of the world we filled

With Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build

Gods and their houses out of dark and light,

and sowed the seed of dragons – ’twas our right

(used or misused), That right has not decayed:

we make still by the law in which we’re made.

Something of the same view was held by Hugo Dyson. In a British Academy lecture on Shakespeare’s tragedies – not delivered until 1950 but presumably expressing ideas that he had held for some years – Dyson said: ‘Man without art is eyeless; man with art and nothing else would see little but the reflections of his own fears and desires.’ And Owen Barfield in Poetic Diction had expressed a similar notion when he said that in studying great poetry, ‘our mortality catches for a moment the music of the turning spheres’.

These views could hardly have been more different from those held by one of the major and most influential literary critics of the time, F. R. Leavis. Indeed, Leavis and the contributors to his periodical Scrutiny were the group of critics whom Lewis was by implication attacking in The Personal Heresy and ‘Christianity and Literature’. From the beginning of his work at Cambridge, Leavis campaigned for the recognition of ‘culture’ as the basis of a humane society, but did not believe that this culture should be based on any one objective standard, least of all Christianity. He declared that there was among educated persons ‘sufficient measure of agreement, overt and implicit, about essential values to make it unnecessary to discuss ultimate sanctions, or to provide a philosophy, before starting to work’.

In answer to this, Lewis declared that Leavis and one of the other great critics of the period, I. A. Richards, were part of a ‘tradition of educated infidelity’ which could be traced to Matthew Arnold, were even indeed ‘one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century’. He also said that Leavis’s position as a critic was fundamentally based on subjective judgement and nothing more, which he said was ‘like trying to lift yourself by your own coat collar’; and he declared: ‘Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.’ He said too that the ‘personal heresy’ in Leavis’s and Richards’s work could be traced to this subjectivism: ‘Since the real wholeness is not, for them, in the objective universe, it has to be located inside the poet’s head. Hence the quite disproportionate emphasis laid by them on the poet.’ And he summed up the differences between them when he said: ‘Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality.’

*

While Lewis was widening his reputation as a literary critic, Owen Barfield was tied to an office job in London. He had found that he could not make a living from literary work – he now had a wife and children to support – so he entered his father’s legal firm in London and became a solicitor, hoping to continue writing in his spare time. But this proved to be a mirage. First there was the challenge of learning a new discipline, and then simply the exhaustion of the job. Though he still wrote poetry, none of it got into print, and for some years the total of his published works was a children’s story, The Silver Trumpet, a short book entitled History in English Words, and Poetic Diction. Lewis often referred to this book and to Barfield’s notions about myth and language in his lectures and in his own published writings, so often indeed that it became a jest among his pupils that Barfield was actually an alter ego, a figment of Lewis’s imagination to whom Lewis chose to ascribe some of his own opinions.

To Barfield, the jest was perhaps rather hollow. He had not wanted to slide into this obscurity. Nor was there in his friendship with Lewis quite the same richness as there had once been. They still went on walking tours, until the increasing suburbanisation of the countryside and the outbreak of war brought that annual event finally to a halt. But they did not argue as before, at least not about fundamentals, for now that he had become a Christian Lewis ceased to discuss his beliefs with his old friend. This was rather to Barfield’s regret, for he had found few people of weighty intellect in the Anthroposophical movement, and he would have been glad of a rational exchange of views. But Lewis shied away from real argument; he had made up his mind.

Meanwhile Barfield was obliged to continue in his London office, even when war seemed imminent, dealing with the petty grind of routine legal work. As he expressed it in a moment of fury:

How I hate this bloody business,

Peddling property and strife

While the pulse of Europe falters –

How I hate this bloody life!

*

The Hobbit was published in 1937. It had come to the notice of a London publisher, and Tolkien was persuaded to finish it in time for it to be issued in the autumn of that year. Lewis was delighted, and he helped the book on its way by giving it two glowing reviews, both in The Times and in The Times Literary Supplement. In the first he wrote: ‘All who love that kind of children’s book which can be read and re-read by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in this constellation. To the trained eye some characters will seem almost mythopoeic.’ And he concluded by saying of Tolkien that he ‘has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity which is worth oceans of glib “originality”.’ In The Times Literary Supplement he classed the book with the works of his beloved George MacDonald, and remarked: ‘No common recipe for children’s stories will give you creatures so rooted in their own soil and history as those of Professor Tolkien – who obviously knows much more about them than he needs for this tale.’

By now Tolkien had read much of The Silmarillion to Lewis, and when at the end of 1937 he began to write a sequel to The Hobbit he passed his new chapters to Lewis. ‘Mr Lewis and my youngest boy are reading it in bits as a serial,’ Tolkien told his publishers when reporting on its progress. He also said that the boy (his third son, Christopher) and Lewis ‘approve it enough to say that they think it is better than The Hobbit’.

By the time that Lewis began to read Tolkien’s still untitled new story, he himself had turned his hand to fiction again. His new book began as a joint project, a kind of bargain or wager with Tolkien, who recalled of it: ‘Lewis said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves.”’ What they had in mind was stories that were ‘mythopoeic’ but were thinly disguised as popular thrillers. Tolkien began on ‘The Lost Road’, the tale of a journey back through time to the land of Númenor. Lewis decided to tackle space-travel because he wished to refute what he considered to be a prevalent and dangerous notion: that interplanetary colonisation by mankind was morally acceptable and even a necessary step forward for the human race. (He found this notion clearly expressed by J. B. S. Haldane in the final chapter of Possible Worlds.) He also wanted to do what he had attempted in The Pilgrim’s Regress, to give the Christian story a fresh excitement by retelling it as if it were a new myth. His choice of science fiction as a form was also influenced by his admiration for H. G. Wells – or rather, for Wells’s narrative powers, but not his ideology – and for David Lyndsay, whose Voyage to Arcturus (he said) ‘first suggested to me that the form of “science fiction” could be filled by spiritual experiences’.

Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet was finished by the autumn of 1937. He submitted it to J. M. Dent, who had published Dymer and The Pilgrim’s Regress; but they turned it down. Tolkien then came to Lewis’s aid. He recommended the book in warm terms (though not without criticism) to his own publisher, Stanley Unwin, the chairman of Allen & Unwin who had published The Hobbit. ‘I read the story in the original MS.,’ he told Unwin, ‘and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it. My first criticism was simply that it was too short. I still think that criticism holds, for both practical and artistic reasons. Other criticisms, concerning narrative style (Lewis is always apt to have rather creaking stiff-jointed passages), inconsistent details in the plot, and philology, have since been corrected to my satisfaction. The author holds to items of linguistic invention that do not appeal to me (Malacandra, Maleldil – eldila in any case I suspect to be due to the influence of the Eldar in The Silmarillion –) but this is a matter of taste.’ And Tolkien concluded: ‘I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.’

Allen & Unwin’s readers reported unfavourably on the book, and the firm turned it down. But Stanley Unwin passed it to The Bodley Head, of which he was also chairman, and they accepted it and brought it out a few months later, in the autumn of 1938. Many people were soon echoing Tolkien’s enthusiasm for it. Not that he had been obliged to rely solely on his own judgement in recommending it, for, as he told Stanley Unwin in another letter, after reading the book in manuscript he had ‘heard it pass rather a different test: that of being read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud). It proved an exciting serial, and was highly approved. But of course we are all rather like-minded.’

This was in February 1938. In June of the same year, Tolkien wrote (again to Unwin): ‘You may not have noticed that on June 2 the Rev. Adam Fox was elected Professor of Poetry (at Oxford). He was nominated by Lewis and myself, and miraculously elected: our first public victory over established privilege. For Fox is a member of our literary club of practising poets – before whom The Hobbit, and other works (such as the Silent Planet) have been read. We are slowly getting into print.’ Fox was a Magdalen don and had been a friend, though not an intimate, of Lewis for about ten years. As for the ‘literary club of practising poets’, neither of the Lewis brothers was keeping a diary at this time, and there is no mention of it in their papers until more than a year later when, on 11 November 1939, Jack Lewis wrote in a letter to Warnie: ‘On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings’.

*

After the dissolution of Tangye Lean’s ‘Inklings’ at University College, the name, Tolkien recalled, ‘was then transferred (by C. S. L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C. S. L. and met in his rooms at Magdalen’. There is no record of precisely when this happened – if indeed it was a precise event and not a gradual process. Tolkien seems to imply that it took place as soon as Tangye Lean’s club broke up, which would be in about 1933. On the other hand there is no contemporary mention of it until Tolkien’s report of their ‘public victory’ in the professorial election of 1938.

Lewis never explained why he transferred the name ‘Inklings’ from the undergraduate club to the group of his friends. Yet there was a certain attraction in its ambiguity. Tolkien said of it: ‘It was a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.’

*

Lewis’s walking tours with his brother and with Barfield came to an end with the outbreak of war. Warnie Lewis had acquired a small two-berth cabin cruiser which he moored at Salter’s boatyard on the Thames in Oxford, and which he called Bosphorus. In August 1939 he arranged to take Jack and Hugo Dyson on a short holiday up the river. But war now seemed likely, and when the time came Warnie, who had rejoined the Royal Army Service Corps with the rank of Major, was obliged to report for army duty. Jack and Dyson had no wish to cancel their trip, but neither of them felt able to manage the practical side of a motor boat; so they enlisted the Lewis family doctor, R. E. Havard, as navigator, he being a man whom Lewis much liked and admired, a Catholic convert who would cheerfully allow Lewis to engage him in a philosophical conversation when they were supposed to be discussing medical symptoms. The party met at Folly Bridge at midday on Saturday 26 August. The pact between Germany and Russia had just been signed, and there was much anxiety about what would be the consequences. ‘Yet’, recalled Havard, ‘our spirits were high at the prospect of a temporary break with politics and daily chores.’

They set off up the Thames from Oxford, following the river through low meadows and past riverside pubs (‘Few of these’, remarked Havard, ‘escaped a visit from us’). On the first evening, after an hour or two spent at the Trout Inn at Godstow, Dyson and Lewis began a vigorous argument about the Renaissance, which Lewis contended had never happened at all, or if it had, hadn’t mattered. They went on through the darkness to the Rose Revived at Newbridge; Lewis and Dyson slept in the inn while Havard spent the night on board. ‘The next morning, Sunday,’ recalled Havard, ‘we moved on to Tadpole Bridge and separated on foot to our respective churches in Buckland a mile or so away. That afternoon after lunch we went on upstream and met, coming down, Robert Gibbings in a canoe, naked to the waist. His bearded figure was greeted rapturously by Lewis with a quotation:

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

At this, Gibbings picked up an enormous conch from the bottom of his canoe and attempted to blow a fanfare on it. After some lively talk, each craft went on its way. Gibbings later put some of the canoe trip into his book Sweet Thames Run Softly.

‘We saw no papers’ (continues Havard) ‘and were cut off from all news except what Lewis and Dyson gathered from the inns where they slept at night. I remember an hour on a riverside lawn waiting for lunch to be ready at Radcot. I remember an evening meal at Lechlade and an expedition upstream for half a mile to Inglesham and the ruined opening into the disused Thames and Severn Canal. I remember little of the return downstream except that the engine broke down, as engines of small boats often do. Lewis and Dyson shared a tow rope on the river bank. I offered my own share; but neither of the other two seemed able to keep the boat out of the bank while it was being towed. So after a short spell ashore I was voted back again to the helm. About this time also the weather broke. Fortunately for tempers, the engine recovered and returned to duty.