The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (9 page)

A Purely Logical Entity

Not long after Lewis encountered his First Friend, he met his master teacher: William Thompson Kirkpatrick (1848–1921), a.k.a. “Kirk,” a.k.a. “The Great Knock.” Kirkpatrick has risen to the status of an archetypal hero among Lewisians, who know him both as Lewis’s tutor and, fictionalized, as the skeptical MacPhee (or McPhee) in
Perelandra
,
That Hideous Strength
, and
The Dark Tower
, and as Professor Kirke of the Narnian Chronicles. Kirkpatrick was an Ulster Scot, originally from Boardmills, County Down, who grew up in Belfast, attended Queen’s College, and achieved a licentiate in theology in preparation for the Presbyterian ministry, but did not pursue ordination, instead directing his course toward education and working his way to the position of headmaster at Lurgan College, the public grammar school attended by Albert Lewis. A revered mentor to many (including Albert) at Lurgan, Kirkpatrick stayed in touch with his former pupil and occasionally retained his services as solicitor.

By 1914, Kirkpatrick was living, semiretired, with his wife in Great Bookham, Surrey. He had recently helped Warnie surmount an undistinguished academic record to achieve a prize cadetship at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Now it was time for Lewis to come under his wing, as a way of delivering him from Malvern. Even Albert, slow to grasp the facts about his children, though genuinely moved when their miseries came to his attention, acknowledged to Warnie that Lewis was “simply out of his proper environment, and would possibly wither and decay rather than grow if kept in such surroundings.” Why not send him to Kirkpatrick, Warnie proposed, adding rather acridly that “there would be no one there except Mr and Mrs K for him to talk to, and he could amuse himself by detonating his little stock of cheap intellectual fireworks under old K’s nose.” After some dithering and negotiating, the question was settled, and Kirkpatrick agreed to take on Lewis come September.

On June 7, 1914, Lewis was freed, under gas, from the two “hopelessly rotten” teeth that had tormented him all year. By August he was set free from Malvern, too, and on a memorable Saturday, September 19, he was on the train to Great Bookham anticipating, based on wholly misleading reports from his father, a cataract of sentimentality from the famous teacher. When the train pulled into the station, Lewis found himself before a tall, lean, muscular man with graying mustache and side whiskers, dressed like a laborer; a man whose body, as it proved, reflected his mind. Lewis essayed some small talk, to the effect that the local scenery was wilder than he had anticipated. “Stop!” said Kirkpatrick. “What do you mean by wildness and what grounds had you for not expecting it?” This peremptory challenge set the tone for an intellectual apprenticeship, in which Lewis learned how to think in the same rigorously logical, combative mode, demanding precedent, statistical or experiential evidence, a “ruthless dialectic” leading to the final verdict, “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?” Lewis adored this style and made it his own; when, later, some of his tutees accused him of intellectual bullying, it was this take-no-prisoners rational assault that they had in mind. It slaked one half of his mind’s thirst for meaning, as Joy filled the other half.

Kirkpatrick proved an exemplary instructor. Following a rigorous daily program, he instilled in his pupil the fugal glories of high dialectic while unveiling to him the literary splendors of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus (until Lewis found himself thinking in Greek, “the great Rubicon” of language learning, as he puts it); of Lucretius, Catullus, Tacitus, Herodotus; and of the divine Dante. Lewis added to this his own enthusiasms, soaking up Milton, Malory, Sidney, and William Morris. This was the life of the mind, perfected in the English countryside. These were the best years of Lewis’s life, when “I suppose I reached as much happiness as is ever to be reached on earth.”

All this glory Lewis laid at Kirkpatrick’s feet. And what a character he describes for us in his autobiography! His teacher’s nickname, the Great Knock, refers presumably to his debating style or to his ability to knock nonsense out of and sound thinking into his pupil. It might also describe his approach to the cosmos at large: he battered it down, hammering away at irrational beliefs and sentimental fancies, turning, in the course of his adult life, from a ministerial candidate into a fierce atheist, a devotee of Schopenhauer and
The Golden Bough.
Although he had renounced religion, his regular habits, such as wearing his Sabbath best when he gardened on Sundays, suggested a Puritan scrupulosity, and his skepticism and logical rigor savored of a Puritan’s zeal for testing the spirits to see whether they are of God. “If ever a man came near to being a purely logical entity,” Lewis wrote, “that man was Kirk.” The phrase gives one pause. “A purely logical entity” is, of course, a fiction—a character in fiction, like MacPhee in
That Hideous Strength
, declaiming, “I have repeatedly explained to you the distinction between a personal feeling of confidence and a logical satisfaction of the claims of evidence.”

There is, unfortunately, little independent corroboration of Lewis’s portrait in
Surprised by Joy
of the Great Knock. One pupil, who remembered Kirkpatrick as a young man in his twenties, when he was teaching at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution, describes him as “a man of unusual mental power and grasp, of an overmastering influence on the mind, and of an intellectual honesty and vigour before which pretence and make-believe were dissipated like smoke before a strong wind.” The same source adds that “he became an almost incomparable teacher, and under him the boys swept on to victory over their work and to mastery of their subjects and of themselves. His pistol never missed fire; but he gave you the impression that, if it did, as Goldsmith said of Johnson, you would be knocked down by the butt-end.” This hints at Kirkpatrick /MacPhee, but it is a thin charcoal sketch, while Lewis offers us a portrait soaked in color and animated by his own inner life. For Lewis, Kirkpatrick personified noble, sane, cultured, manly, skeptical, liberating Reason. When Kirkpatrick died in March 1921, Lewis fancied him accosting God with Voltairean irony:
“Je soup
ç
onne entre nous que vous n’existez pas.”

Eager to occupy the same higher plane as his great teacher and reveling in the
otium liberale
that prevailed at Gastons, the Kirkpatrick home, Lewis hoped he could avoid having to return to Belfast for his confirmation in December 1914. As he put it to Arthur, “firstly, I am very happy at Bookham, and secondly, a week at home, if it is to be spent in pulling long faces in Church & getting confirmed, is no great pleasure—a statement, I need hardly say, for yourself alone.” To his father he sent an officious letter pointing out the inconvenience and cost: “It seems a great pity this confirmation should occur when it does, thus cutting out a week of valuable time. Although fully sensible that it is of course of more importance than the work, yet if it could possibly be managed at some more convenient date in the near future, I should think it an advantage.” It was a craven exercise, he felt, looking back on it later. He went through with the confirmation, already an unbeliever but unwilling to court interminable wrangling with his father by pressing the point.

By the time he was ready to leave his tutor’s home, Lewis was at once a poet—creator of vaguely spiritual, excruciatingly earnest lyric poems about dream gardens and mist-clad peaks, mostly written during the holidays—and a philosopher, eager to display his newly won freedom from what he considered Christian dogma and cant:

You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I beleive [
sic
] in no religion. There is absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is, all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. Primitive man found himself surrounded by all sorts of terrible things he didn’t understand—thunder, pestilence, snakes etc.: what more natural than to suppose that these were animated by evil spirits trying to torture him. These he kept off by cringing to them, singing songs and making sacrifices etc. Gradually from being mere nature-spirits these supposed being[s] were elevated into more elaborate ideas, such as the old gods: and when man became more refined he pretended that these spirits were good as well as powerful.

Armed with his new skills in debating and analyzing, and immunized from what he now deemed a childish, secondhand credulity, Lewis moved on from the Stoic Porch that was Great Bookham and headed for Oxford. There he would meet his future, and the war, and Owen Barfield, his Second Friend.

3

ADVENT LYRICS

Tolkien entered Oxford University in October 1911, arriving by automobile with another King Edward’s student, L. K. Sands, who would be cut down four years later by a German machine gun on the Western Front. On this particularly hot autumn day, however, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was still romancing his Duchess Sophie at the Austrian court, and the future, with its promise of great trials and greater triumphs, beckoned fairly to a young man about to enter the most celebrated university in the world.

Oxford University had been in existence for more than seven centuries. In the year that Tolkien became a resident, it was as breathtakingly beautiful as it is today, medieval and neomedieval structures piercing the sky like lances declaring the triumph of the mind, a bastion of elitism, the nation’s intellectual epicenter. Tolkien enrolled at Exeter, one of the oldest colleges (founded in 1314), famed for its cozy common rooms and its Pre-Raphaelite alumni, including Edward Burne-Jones (also a King Edward’s alumnus) and William Morris, whose tapestries, murals, paintings, and tales of other worlds would influence Tolkien’s own productions. His rooms looked over Turl Street, an ancient shunt between the main arteries of Broad Street and the High Street; Exeter shares this passage with two other colleges, Jesus and Lincoln, leading to the following jest, which reflects the lighthearted spirit and burgeoning religious skepticism of this prewar era: “In what way is the Church of England like the Turl? It runs from the High to the Broad and goes straight past Jesus.”

Tolkien never passed by Jesus, but during his first year at Oxford, he seemed to have difficulty choosing between high-minded studies and broad-minded antics, and he came dangerously close to fulfilling the popular image of the brilliant, languid, unfocused undergraduate. He joined every undergraduate circle that caught his eye, signing up for the Stapledon Debating Society, the Dialectical Society, the Essay Club, and others. The King Edward’s School
Chronicle
reported that “Tolkien, if we are to be guided by the countless notices on his mantelpiece, has joined all the Exeter Societies which are in existence.” He also established two clubs of his own, first the Apolausticks (Aristotle’s term in the
Nicomachean Ethics
for vulgar masses who devote their lives to pleasure), then the Chequers Clubbe, both specializing in whimsical lectures and elaborate dinners. In addition, he took to collecting Japanese furniture and wearing expensive clothes, making liberal use of his allowance from Father Francis. He had many friends, but few close ones apart from Colin Cullis, a handsome boy who would die a few years later in the great flu epidemic.

Amid all these diversions, Tolkien’s studies suffered. His chosen field was classics, in which he read widely but spottily, and in 1913 he made a poor showing in Honour Moderations, the first exam hurdle for those who specialized in “Greats” or Literae Humaniores, the study of Greek and Latin classics in the original tongues along with allied subjects. This draconian rite of passage consisted of twelve written exams, each three hours long, spread over a week; students were required to translate Homer and Virgil, explain the principles of Greek and Latin grammar and composition, and display a knowledge of antiquities. Tolkien earned a second-class degree, not a dreadful showing but poor for a student of limited means eager to justify his scholarship. Bacchus had taken his toll.

Hail,
É
arendel!

Humphrey Carpenter suggests that after the death of his mother, Tolkien became “two people”: one “cheerful, almost irrepressible,” the other “capable of bouts of profound despair.” With this in mind, Tolkien’s undergraduate taste for glittering dinner parties and dandyish dress may be read as the behavior of an ebullient boy chasing every passing fancy—or that of a wounded boy running as fast as he could from the abyss of loss opened by his mother’s death. It may be, however, that he was simply biding his time, feeling his way, giving everything a try, uncertain where to pour his energies. All changed in November or December 1911—the same late autumn in which Lewis encountered Balder and Northernness—when he made two discoveries, one in his studies, one in his art, that set his course for years to come.

On November 25, 1911, he checked out, from the Exeter Reading Room, C.N.E. Eliot’s
A Finnish Grammar
. This small maroon volume became for Tolkien the gateway to a new and magical world. Part of its attraction, to a dreamy undergraduate surfeited with the exactitude of Greek and Latin declensions and conjugations, may have been the indefiniteness of the language it presented. Eliot contends in his preface that “the Finnish language is still in so unsettled and fluid a condition, as regards both forms and style, that it is often hard to say what is correct and what not,” a description that must have appealed to Tolkien’s sense of whimsy, just as Finnish’s many difficulties (according to Eliot, it “deserves its undesirable reputation of being the most difficult language spoken in Europe, except perhaps Basque”) must have appealed to his sense of challenge. To W. H. Auden, forty-four years later, Tolkien likened his encounter with Finnish to the discovery of a wine cellar stocked with an exquisite new vintage that “quite intoxicated me.” In this state of philological inebriation, he began to flesh out his own invented languages with Finnish elements, leading in time to the formulation of Qenya (later “Quenya”), the most exalted of his Elvish tongues and a catalyst for his mythological inventions.