The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (93 page)

“Every one has heard … is appealing to”: Lewis,
Broadcast Talks
(London: Geoffrey Bles, Centenary Press, 1942), 9.

“Well, those are the two points”: Ibid., 13.

“There’s been a great deal … You may even have thought”: Ibid., 27–29.

“Supposing you hear a cry”: Ibid., 19.

“Suddenly everyone just froze … there was the barman”: Phillips,
C. S. Lewis in a Time of War
, 119.

“One gets funny letters”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 504.

“after you have realized”: Lewis,
Broadcast Talks
, 32.

“enemy-occupied territory … the story of how”: Ibid., 46.

“the dark curse of Hitler”: Winston Churchill, July 14, 1940, BBC broadcast, in Winston Churchill,
Into Battle: Speeches by the Right Hon. Winston S. Churchill
(London: Cassell, 1941), 251. The complete sentence runs “This is a War of the Unknown Warriors; but let all strive without failing in faith or in duty, and the dark curse of Hitler will be lifted from our age.”

“
what
new urgency?”: C. S. Lewis, “Evil and God,”
The Spectator
CLXVI (February 7, 1941): 141. Reprinted in C. S. Lewis,
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1970), 22.

“fighting religion”: Lewis,
Broadcast Talks
, 39.

“good dreams … the most shocking thing”: Ibid., 49–50.

“I’m trying here”: Ibid., 50–51.

“Hebrew philosopher Yeshua”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 1, 231.

“as a literary historian”: Lewis, “What are we to make of Jesus Christ?” Reprinted from
Asking Them Questions
, 3rd series, ed. Ronald Selby Wright (Oxford University Press, 1950), 47–53, in Lewis,
God in the Dock
, 158.

“Of course you can take the line”: Quoted by Hooper,
C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide
, 308.

“in Christ”: Lewis,
Broadcast Talks,
57. Note that this “new man” is on an altogether different model from the Nietzschean or Theosophical “higher man.”

“Give up yourself”: Lewis,
Mere Christianity
, 226–27.

“take some … They obviously”: Hooper,
C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide
, 310–13.

“With the BBC … There will be”: P. W. [Philip Whitwell] Wilson, “Prophecy Via BBC,”
The New York Times
(July 22, 1945): 98.

“the silly-clever … They are not really”: George Orwell, “As I Please,”
Tribune
(October 27, 1944), reprinted in George Orwell,
The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell
, ed. Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus, and George Orwell (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 264–65.

“People whose lives”: Wain,
Sprightly Running
, 138.

“there are no
ordinary
people”: C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory,”
Weight of Glory
, 19.

“this club”: Walter Hooper, “Oxford’s Bonny Fighter,” in Como,
C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table
, 138.

“Those who founded it … We never claimed”: Lewis, preface to
Socratic Digest
1, reprinted as “The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club” in
God in the Dock
, 128.

“Here a man”: Lewis, “The Founding of the Oxford Socratic Club,”
God in the Dock
, 127.

“a kind of prize-ring … I can remember”: Wain,
Sprightly Running
, 140–41.

“He was a bonny fighter”: Austin Farrer, “The Christian Apologist,” in Gibb,
Light on C. S. Lewis
, 25–26.

“simple-minded undergraduates … in a straightforward, manly way”: Wain,
Sprightly Running
, 140.

“Minto is laid up”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 549.

“a little oasis … that horrid house”: W. H. Lewis,
Brothers and Friends
, 181.

“I am inclined”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 771.

“In the
Tao
”: C. S. Lewis,
The Abolition of Man
(New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001), 74–75.

“I hear rumours”: Ibid., 79.

“a real triumph”: Quoted in Hooper,
C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide
, 341.

“a doctrine never seems”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 730.

“From all my lame”: Ibid., 527. The poem was later published as “The Apologist’s Evening Prayer” in C. S. Lewis,
Poems
, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1964), 129.

“the chapter of Major Lewis’ projected book … not think so well”: Tolkien,
Letters
, 71.

“I seemed to be standing in a busy queue … the Big Man”: Lewis,
The Great Divorce
(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1946; New York: HarperCollins, 2001), 1–3.

“Tousle-Headed Poet”: Ibid., 4, 7–9.

“the Intelligent Man”: Ibid., 9, 48–49.

an Anglican bishop of progressive views: Ibid., 16, 34–44.

“Well … this is hardly the sort of society I’m used to”: Ibid., 2.

“blazing with golden light”: Ibid., 3.

“I had the sense of being in a larger space”: Ibid., 20.

“raindrops that would pierce him like bullets”: Ibid., x.

identified the story: See Douglas A. Anderson,
Tales Before Narnia: The Roots of Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction
(New York: Del Rey, 2008), 283–84. The story is reprinted here, 284–300.

“‘Golly!’ thought I”: Lewis,
Great Divorce
, 21.

bright spirits: Brightest among the spirits is a Sarah Smith, who had lived an ordinary but unstintingly saintly life in Golders Green, a London neighborhood known for its Jewish population, suggesting that Lewis intends her to be Jewish.

“Of course I should require some assurances”: Lewis,
Great Divorce
, 39.

“I came here to get my rights”: Ibid., 31.

“To any that leaves … will have been Hell”: Ibid., 68.

““at the end of all things … We were always in Hell”: Ibid., 69.

“nearly nothing”: Ibid., 139.

“My Roman Catholic friends would be surprised … ‘They’re both right’”: Ibid., 71.

“the sort of universe”: Lewis, “Learning in Wartime,” 32.

“Don’t you like”: Lewis,
Collected Letters,
vol. 1, 215.

“I don’t think”: Ibid., 220.

“I have finished”: Ibid., 290.

the new generation: See J. Middleton Murry, “Milton or Shakespeare?”
The Nation and the Athenaeum
28 (March 26, 1921): 916–17, and T. S. Eliot, “A Note on the Verse of John Milton,”
Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association
21 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), 32–40.

“Milton’s dislodgement”: F. R. Leavis, “In Defence of Milton,”
Scrutiny
(June 1938): 104–114; reprinted in F. R. Leavis,
The Common Pursuit
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1952), 33–43.

“partly anticipated … that when the old poets”: C. S. Lewis,
A Preface to Paradise Lost
(London: Oxford University Press, 1942), v.

“that great miracle … the proper order”: Charles Williams, introduction,
The English Poems of John Milton
, from the edition of H. C. Beeching, The World’s Classics 182 (London: Oxford University Press, 1940), ix.

“the recovery of … Apparently the door”: Lewis,
Preface to Paradise Lost
, v–vi.

“any of the normal … frenzy of special pleading”: W. W. Robson, “Mr. Empson on
Paradise Lost
,”
The Oxford Review
; reprinted in Robson,
Critical Essays
, 87.

“It is not”: Lewis,
Preface to Paradise Lost
, 134.

“if only he”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 561–62.

“Now that ‘Weston’ has shut”: Lewis,
Out of the Silent Planet
, 158.

in Lewis’s rooms: Alastair Fowler, personal interview, October 13, 2006. For the Matthew testimony, see Hooper,
C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide
, 215.

“‘Of course … the sort of time-travelling’”: C. S. Lewis, “The Dark Tower,” in C. S. Lewis,
The Dark Tower and Other Stories
, ed. Walter Hooper (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1977), 17.

“in time to prevent their ‘falling’”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 503.

“I’ve got Ransom to Venus … Have you room for an extra prayer?”: Ibid., 496.

“Every night Venus”: Ibid., 397.

“scattered through other worlds”: Lewis,
Perelandra
, 40.

“in something … with principalities”: Ibid., 21.

“four or five people”: Ibid., 25.

“Humphrey”: It was Dyson who came up with “Humphrey” as a nickname when he couldn’t remember Havard’s first name. Lyle W. Dorsett, oral history interview with Dr. Robert E. Havard, 8.

“celestial coffin”: Lewis,
Perelandra
, 29.

“we had raids”: Ibid., 26.

“a sceptical friend … engulfed”: Ibid., 29–30.

“for one draught”: Ibid., 42.

“itch to have things”: Ibid., 43.

Life Force … “blind, inarticulate purposiveness”: Ibid., 78. As Lewis suggests in
Studies in Words
, the word “life” and all its compounds (life force, life-affirming) had in his day a mystical aura attached to it that made it off-limits to criticism. See “Life,”
Studies in Words
, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 304–305.

“the most terrifying”: Charles Andrew Brady, “C. S. Lewis: II,”
America
71 (June 10, 1944): 270.

“far away on Earth”: Lewis,
Perelandra
, 121.

“an inspired litany”: Victor Hamm, “Mr Lewis in Perelandra,”
Thought
20 (June 1945): 271–90.

“irregular Spenserian stanzas”:
The Letters of Ruth Pitter: Silent Music
, ed. Don W. King (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2014), 158, note 73.

“secret fear … It is at this point”: Alistair Cooke, “Mr. Anthony at Oxford,”
The New Republic
110, no. 17 (April 24, 1944).

“The schaddow of that hidduous strenth”: Lewis,
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama
, 104.

“somehow what he thought”: Owen Barfield, “The Five C. S. Lewises,”
Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis
, 22.

“violation of frontier … invaded by”: C. S. Lewis, “The Novels of Charles Williams,”
On Stories
,
22.

Logres: Lewis,
That Hideous Strength
, 191–92; Lewis’s character MacPhee quotes a line from Williams’s Arthurian poem
Taliessin Through Logres
.

“one of the great … this desire”: C. S. Lewis, “The Inner Ring” [the annual Commemoration Oration, King’s College London, December 14, 1944], originally published in C. S. Lewis,
Transposition and Other Addresses
(London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949); quoted here from
The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses
, 100–103.

“to make man”: Lewis,
That Hideous Strength
, 40.

“It is commonly done”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 717.

“wasn’t meant to illustrate”: Ibid., 669–70.

“drawn in”: Lewis,
That Hideous Strength
, 81, 112.

Mr. Bultitude: Lewis told Sayers that “Mr. Bultitude is described by Tolkien as a portrait of the author, but I feel that is too high a compliment (Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 682). More likely, Lewis is paying homage to F. Anstey’s
Vice Versa
, in which Mr. Bultitude is the father who under an enchantment exchanges bodies with his son and finds out what boarding school life is really like.

“the last vestige”: Lewis,
That Hideous Strength
, 282.

“so preposterous”: George Orwell, “The Scientists Take Over,”
Manchester Evening News
, August 16, 1945, reprinted in
The Complete Works of George Orwell
, ed. Peter Davison, Vol. XVII (1998), No. 2720 (first half), 250–51. This is Orwell’s review of
That Hideous Strength.

“opera-bouffe”: Owen Barfield, introduction to Gibb,
Light on C. S. Lewis
, xvi.

“I wish he’d dedicated”: Hooper,
C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide
, 706.

“has got a more unanimous”: Lewis,
Collected Letters
, vol. 2, 682.

“That Hideous Strength”:
Ibid., 701.

“I have just read”: Ibid., 571.

“the novel at present”: Ibid., 574.

“I’m writing a story”: Ibid., 634.

The Apostles: Members included F. D. Maurice; James Clerk Maxwell; Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Henry Sidgwick; the mathematician G. H. Hardy and his Brahmin prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan; Roger Fry; Alfred North Whitehead; J.M.E. McTaggart; Bertrand Russell; G. E. Moore; Ludwig Wittgenstein; Leonard Woolf; Lytton and James Strachey; E. M. Forster; Desmond MacCarthy; Rupert Brooke; and John Maynard Keynes.

“To set up as a critic”: I. A. Richards,
Principles of Literary Criticism
, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1926; reprint ed., London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 54.

“appetencies”: Ibid., 42–43 et passim.

“stock responses … doctrinal adhesions”: I. A. Richards,
Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), 14.

huge crowds: See John Paul Russo,
I. A. Richards: His Life and Work
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 93.

“Here, at last”: Christopher Isherwood,
Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties
(London: L. & Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, 1938), 121.

his reception was decidedly chilly: See Russo,
I. A. Richards: His Life and Work
, 795, note 28.

“when Leavis read poetry”: George Watson,
Never One for Theory
:
England and the War of Ideas
(Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2000), 72.