The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (12 page)

4

HARD KNOCKS AND DREAMING SPIRES

As Tolkien looked to the future, Lewis rummaged in the past. A letter Lewis wrote on November 22, 1916—forty-six years to the day before his death—reveals an eighteen-year-old with the energy of a schoolboy and the tastes of an octogenarian. His lust for culture, preferably nineteenth-century or earlier, was prodigious. He chats about
Aïda
and
The Magic Flute
, enthuses over
House of the Seven Gables
, knocks
Guy Mannering
. He confesses his mad love for a radiant woman—in this case, Dorothy Osborne, a celebrated epistolarian who died in 1695. We get an early sample of his wit, as he announces that “I am desperately in love with her and have accordingly made arrangements to commit suicide from 10 till 4 to-morrow precisely.” At the same time, he senses the dangers of making the past an idol. Earlier in the year he had composed
The Quest of Bleheris
, a sixty-four-page romance in Morrisian mock-medieval prose; now he declares his new work, a fantasy, will be in modern English, which he hopes “will be an improvement.”

It’s evident from this tilt toward modern idiom that, though he has been seriously misunderstood in this regard, Lewis was not an antiquarian. He had no use for modernism, a dismissal that would lead to clashes later on with writers and critics, yet he turned away from the artificial medievalism of Morris and the intricate sentences of Morris’s Victorian peers in favor of a simple, direct manner—verging on condescension in his nonfiction works—that suited perfectly the minds and ears of his twentieth- (and twenty-first-)century readers. He disliked aestheticism and pedantry, shunning both his father’s rhetorical extravagance and his own childish precocity. Most of all, he wanted to break the mold.

He was, at least on the surface, a brilliant, energetic, and likable young man. Kirkpatrick had sent Albert glowing reports about his pupil’s literary and linguistic prowess (“He hardly realizes—how could he at his age—with what a liberal hand nature has bestowed her bounties on him … 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”; moreover, “He is always cheerful, pleasant and obliging to the highest degree.”) But signs of trouble peeped out from beneath the gaiety. The letters to Arthur Greeves that speak of suicide—always worrisome in an adolescent, even if mentioned in jest—give one pause. So, too, does Lewis’s increasing fixation during this period upon sadomasochism. Four of his letters to Arthur he signs Philomastix (“whip lover”), sometimes in Greek characters to thwart snoopy readers (Lewis’s father snatched up and read his correspondence whenever possible, and Lewis may have feared that the same reign of terror prevailed in Greeves’s household). He daydreams in these letters about lashing young ladies of his acquaintance; he even wonders, baselessly, whether William Morris was also entranced by “the rod,” on the strength of a stray sentence in
The Well at the World’s End
. Sadomasochism may be the English vice, but Lewis’s jaunty tone, his eagerness to describe his imagined victims and their stripes, suggest a mind knocked more than usually askew by the fierce energies of teenage sexuality.

He also stepped up his assault on Arthur’s piety, utilizing as his weapon “the recognized scientific account of the growth of religions.” It dismayed Lewis that Arthur still required instruction in these basic facts. If only his friend could be made to realize what he himself now understood with perfect clarity: that setting aside na
ï
ve belief liberates the imagination as well as the senses, making all mythic and literary universes available for unalloyed enjoyment. He could imagine himself, when reading
Beowulf
, “as an old Saxon thane sitting in my hall of a winter’s night, with the wolves & storm outside and the old fellow singing his story.” He could enjoy Malory as the closest thing to an English national epic and Valdemar Adolph Thisted’s lumbering afterlife fantasy,
Letters from Hell
, without agonies of pious fear; above all, the glorious Milton, if one overlooked the overt Christian content of
Paradise Lost
, could be savored for his “Leopard witches” and the like: “He is as voluptuous as Keats, as romantic as Morris, as grand as Wagner, as wierd as Poe, and a better lover of nature than even the Brontës.” With this essentially Romantic, post-Christian conception of the rewards of literary experience, Lewis was primed to embrace all that Oxford University life had to offer.

“Absolutely Topping”

How different, compared to Lewis’s first schoolboy glimpse of England, was the impression Oxford made on him when he arrived in December 1916 to sit for his scholarship examination. The city was hauntingly lovely; without dissembling, he could send an enthusiastic report to his father—“the place has surpassed my wildest dreams: I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights”—only complaining that the poor heating system at Oriel College made it necessary to write his examination papers with gloves on. To his brother in France he wrote, “Oxford is absolutely topping, I am awfully bucked with it and longing to go up…” Though he had harbored doubts about his exam performance, University College offered him a Scholarship, with the added financial support of an Exhibition. The offer was complicated, however, by the expectation that, once an Oxford man, he would present himself for military service; and there was still the hurdle of Responsions, the university entrance exam, which Lewis would have to pass before he could go up to Oxford for good.

He returned to Kirkpatrick to continue “cramming” for the upcoming test, adding Italian, German, and Spanish to his studies so that, if all else failed, he would be eligible for the foreign service. Nonetheless, there was time to write to Arthur Greeves about “That” (and to worry that “in a way we have spoiled our paradise” by dwelling too much on sexual fancies), to work on “Dymer” (a prose precursor to the narrative poem he would labor over sporadically until the mid-1920s) and a poem about “Medea’s Childhood,” and to read as eclectically as ever, devouring Apuleius, Wilkie Collins, Victor Hugo, Maurice Maeterlinck, Anstey’s
The Talking Horse
, Macaulay’s
History of England
, Lamb, Morris, Shelley, Rousseau, and so on.

The Latin and Greek portions of Responsions presented no problem, but Lewis failed the section on mathematics. He had a terrible head for numbers and was unable to handle even the simplest arithmetical problems—counting change was a daily ordeal—much less algebra, a prominent part of the exam. Algebra is defined by the
OED
as “a calculus of symbols,” and Lewis’s failure to master it is worth bearing in mind, in light of his later controversial forays into the application of logic to metaphysics and theology. Nonetheless, he was accepted into University College and returned to Oxford on April 26, 1917, enrolling as an undergraduate on April 29.

The university had changed dramatically since Tolkien’s entry six years earlier. Now it swarmed with troops. Stripped down by the war, University College retained less than a dozen undergraduates when Lewis arrived, and many of them were anxious to head for the front. Although as an Irishman he was for the time being exempt from conscription, eventual military service seemed nearly inevitable. He signed up for the Officer’s Training Corps (better to work toward a commission, the thinking went, than to be conscripted into the lower ranks should things change) and began to gaze across the Channel to France, where Warnie, commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Army Service Corps after a short course of training at Sandhurst, had already been serving, as a supply officer rather than an active combatant, since the end of 1914. Perhaps Lewis felt drawn to follow his big brother, for whom the transition from Malvern to military life, by way of Kirkpatrick, had been a wholly satisfying one; Kirkpatrick restored Warnie’s self-confidence, while Sandhurst and the Service Corps gave him a career in which he could succeed (war was one of the three realms—French history and drinking being the others—in which Warnie would outshine Jack). In any case, it was the temper of the times: unless one was too old, too young, too infirm, or—God forbid—a pacifist, one entered the service.

Outside the scheduled hours of military training, ordinary undergraduate pursuits filled Lewis’s day. He read classics, bathed in and punted on the Cherwell, browsed the books in the Oxford Union, and peered up with admiration at the fading remnants of the Arthurian frescoes painted on the Union ceiling by Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. He also enjoyed the company of a second cousin, a young woman with the delightful name of Cherry Robbins, a volunteer at a military hospital in Oxford and an enthusiast for Wagner, Rackham, and northern mythology, who was “a really ripping kind of person—an awfully good sort.”

Meanwhile, little cracks appeared in his carapace of pessimism and materialism. One or two had surfaced earlier, under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage, for even materialism was vulnerable to the Kirkian challenge. “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?” Having delivered a ponderous lecture to Arthur in an October 1916 letter on the mythological origins of the “Yeshua” cult, he had gone on to admit, “Of course, mind you, I am not laying down as a certainty that there is nothing outside the material world … Anything MAY exist: but until we know that it does, we can’t make any assumptions. The universe is an absolute mystery: man has made many guesses at it, but the answer is yet to seek. Whenever any new light can be got as to such matters, I will be glad to welcome it. In the meantime I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (& already decaying) superstition.”

Now that he was at Oxford, his intellectual horizons inevitably expanded. The vestiges that remained of Oxford’s fin de si
è
cle aestheticism and the first shoots of its postwar religious revival made a deep impression, suggesting to Lewis, though he remained as argumentative an unbeliever as ever, that there existed attractive alternatives to the antireligious positivism of Kirkpatrick. His new friend Theobald Butler, an Irish nationalist with whom Lewis enjoyed “brekker,” bicycling, nude bathing in Parson’s Pleasure, and comparing notes on the dullness of Anglo-Saxons, turned out when drunk to be quite devout in his own way, falling prostrate on Lewis’s floor and calling upon the Holy Ghost, Venus Aphrodite, and the Holy Mother of God. Butler, a man of catholic literary tastes, suggested also that Lewis might like reading the Marquis de Sade. John Robert Edwards, an “ardent Newmanite” recently converted from atheism, provided additional mental challenge: “He came into my rooms last night, and sat till about 12. We had a long talk about religion, Buddhism, poetry and everything else. How I like talking!” So far, though, it was all talk; Lewis felt no impetus to insert John Henry Newman—or John Keble or Edward Bouverie Pusey—into the week’s diet of reading Walter Scott, Ernest Renan, and Andrew Lang, and gazing at Albrecht D
ü
rer prints; it was exciting enough just to absorb all the conflicting impressions. In early June, before moving to Keble College to join his battalion, he mentioned to Arthur that he had been enjoying a book on psychical research, adding that the observed phenomena “do not actually prove the agency of real spirits—yet.” That “yet,” with its anticipation of future revelations, makes all the difference. Like MacPhee in
That Hideous Strength
, he was open to the preternatural, but remained deaf to supernatural claims. This could not have been a comfortable position. Those who delight in mythology and fantasy already have one foot in a spiritual cosmos; now the other foot was beginning to slide.

Five days later, Lewis switched quarters to Keble. He passed the next four months rehearsing for war, bivouacking, and digging trenches in the nearby hills. There was still time to read, though, and he delved into the works of Bishop Berkeley, pronouncing him “one of our few philosophers and a very interesting fellow” and absorbing, though not yet embracing, Berkeley’s subjective idealism and belief in an omnipresent, omniscient creative Mind. That he was already beginning to toy with some form of theism is evident from a July 22 letter to his father expressing a longing to read H. G. Wells’s new book
God the Invisible King
; this was Wells in his wartime religious phase, proposing an experimental nonsectarian utopian creed, rooted in conscience but sans dogma, miracles, priestcraft, or dreams of afterlife.

There was also time, during these curious, unreal months preceding the plunge into the trenches, to get “royally drunk” at a party hosted by his new friend Butler and by E. R. Dodds, an Anglo-Irish classicist and later a celebrated scholar. Neither served in the war, out of sympathy for the Irish nationalist cause; the party celebrated their achievement of first-class degrees, Butler in law and Dodds in Literae Humaniores. During the same period, Lewis also befriended Laurence Bertrand Johnson, a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry who, like Lewis, held a scholarship to an Oxford college and, unlike Lewis, lived in unwavering obedience to his principles. This came as a revelation: for the first time, Lewis saw that an intellectual interest in aesthetics, metaphysics, and literature might coincide with a daily struggle to be chaste, honest, loyal, and all the rest of the conventional virtues. Johnson was a budding theist as well as a vigorous defender of traditional ideas of beauty and goodness; he would have been an excellent prospect for the Inklings if he had survived the war. He did not.

But of the many friends and acquaintances Lewis made during that period who would die on the French or Palestinian front, there was one who by his death would forever change Lewis’s life.

Sons and Mothers

Edward “Paddy” Moore, by himself, counts little in Lewis’s story. The two were billeted at the same time at Keble and assigned as roommates only because their names fell next to one another on an alphabetical list. Paddy was a handsome Anglo-Irishman, raised near Dublin and in Bristol, unintellectual but friendly. Lewis describes him in letters as a “good fellow” and “very decent.” He would be shipped off to France in October as a rifleman. What mattered, in the long run, was not Paddy but his mother: Janie King (Askins) Moore (1872–1951), known to history as “Mrs. Moore.”