C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Another acquaintance at this time who afterwards became a close friend – though the attraction was not immediate – was J.R.R. Tolkien, six years his senior, who had just been elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. They met at the English Faculty meeting at Merton College on 11 May 1926. ‘He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks language is the real thing in the school – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest – still the sound-changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’

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In the Michaelmas Term of 1926 Tolkien founded the Kolbítar, an informal club for dons who met for the purpose of reading the Icelandic sagas and myths in the original Old Icelandic and Old Norse. Lewis joined the club and whatever initial antipathy they may have felt was soon forgotten. It was not long before they were meeting in each other’s rooms and talking far into the night. ‘Tolkien came back with me to college and sat discoursing of the gods and giants and Asgard for three hours’ is a typical note, from a letter to Arthur Greeves on 3 December 1929.

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During 1926 Lewis was still much concerned with poetry. Dymer was at last completed, and accepted by J.M. Dent & Sons in May, being published on 20 September. Before its appearance he was showing some interest in the contemporary poetry, siding with Abercrombie

(#ulink_0407b6f8-0bc1-50ae-b8e4-6c81f5b11483) and the ‘Georgians’ against Eliot

(#ulink_587ebf0b-ec94-534b-a904-8ecfa934b7c5) and the ‘Moderns’. Perhaps piqued at his failure to get any of his own poems accepted, he hatched the idea of a ‘literary dragonade: a series of mock Eliotic poems to be sent up to the Dial and the Criterion until sooner or later one of these filthy editors falls into the trap’.

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Coghill and W.F.R. Hardie, and his pupil Henry Yorke,

(#ulink_5f982def-ad00-5531-b27c-080105c6e156) joined in the scheme – but it does not seem to have gone very far. The American literary critic and philosopher Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) was in Oxford in the spring of 1933 and met Lewis shortly after The Pilgrim’s Regress was published. More was a close friend of T.S. Eliot, and liked his poetry. Even so, Lewis got on well with More and in his letter to him of 23 May 1935 Lewis explained exactly what he thought wrong with Eliot’s poetry:

There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 143 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spearhead of that attack on πéραζ

(#ulink_591bdab0-14b4-5f7c-8936-9cc86debd90b)which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows: I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos. The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Johnson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. And this offence is exaggerated by attendantcircumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalized Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.

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It took Lewis many years to come to terms with ‘modern’ poetry. Though he never accepted it as equal in value to the best of the traditional variety, he came to recognize the greatness of some of its exponents and numbered Eliot and Auden among his personal friends. His favourite contemporary poets, however, seem to have been Charles Williams, Roy Campbell and Kathleen Raine – perhaps he inclined to be over-partial to the poetry when he liked the poet. He never lost his respect for Masefield and the best of the Georgians, whom he would quote, praise and defend when occasion called – though he would allow few virtues to Noyes, perhaps on account of his own dislike for ‘elfin’ poetry, even if written by Herrick or Drayton.

He was reading the proofs of Dymer at this time and feeling an author’s usual sensation of failure and disappointment when it is too late to rewrite or revise. ‘I never liked it less,’ he confessed, ‘I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about. I am afraid this sort of stuff is very much hit or miss, yet I think it is my only real line.’

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Dymer was published on 20 September 1926. That it was a miss was not, however, the opinion of the more discerning reviewers. ‘Mr Clive Hamilton’s long allegorical poem Dymer is executed with a consistent craftsmanship which excites admiration even where criticism is readiest to speak,’ wrote Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times on 19 September; and after picking out several ‘felicitous phrases’ she assured the reader that ‘the tediousness which is so often the chief feature of allegorical poetry is absent’. But, prophetically, she concluded, ‘Mr Hamilton has mistaken his opportunity. The idea was not one for treatment in verse. The exigencies of the poetic line prevent such an easy sequence as the allegory demands; but as a prose tale how splendidly it would have flowed!’

(#ulink_8fe3d0a0-767e-5806-8c61-3c53ad604892) And A.T. Quiller-Couch wrote to Guy Pocock, the editor at Dent, who passed it on to Lewis, ‘Dymer is a fine piece of work: fine in conception and full of brilliant lines and images. Can you convey my thanks to the author of the best new thing I have read for many a long day? He has that gift of metaphor too, which Aristotle was cunning enough to spot as the one quality of style which cannot be taught or imparted because it is genius, and its happy owner is born with it.’

After Christmas with his father and Warnie (the last Christmas they were all to spend together, for Warnie was posted to the Far East the following April), Lewis began on his next poem, The King of Drum, still feeling that his literary future lay in the direction of epic. The full history of this, perhaps his most successful work of this kind, is given in the introduction to Narrative Poems (1969) where it was first published. Lewis worked eagerly on the poem for a time, but seems to have given it up as Dymer proved more and more obviously to be a failure from the financial point of view. By 1938, when he consulted John Masefield on its merits, he had rewritten it as The Queen of Drum, with a certain amount of Christian symbolism worked into it. Masefield urged publication, and other friends read and enjoyed it from time to time. Lewis read part of it aloud at the Oxford Summer Diversions on 4 August 1938 – but somehow it never won into print, though he was still considering publication twenty years after this.

The burst of poetic creativity in January 1927 coincided with the first definite evidence for the spiritual worries and struggles that were to lead Lewis back to Christianity four years later. During a solitary walk on 18 January he was

thinking about imagination and intellect and the unholy muddle I am in about them at present: undigested scraps of anthroposophy and psychoanalysis jostling with orthodox idealism over a background of good old Kirkian rationalism. Lord, what a mess! And all the time (with me) there’s the danger of falling back into most childish superstitions, or of running into dogmatic materialism to escape them. I hoped the ‘King of Drum’ might write itself so as to clear things up – the way ‘Dymer’ cleared up the Christina Dream business.

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But he was still attacking religion – with, perhaps, some of the shrill contempt of the man who does not want to believe rather than of one who simply does not believe. ‘A pest on all this nonsense which has half spoiled so much beauty and wonder for me, degraded pure imagination into pretentious lying, and truths of the spirit into mere matters of fact, slimed everything over with the trail of its infernal mumbo-jumbo,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927, after rereading the myth of Atlantis from Plato, and realizing how Steiner had interpreted it from the point of view of Anthroposophy. ‘How I would have enjoyed this myth once: now behind Plato’s delightful civilized imagination I always have the picture of dark old traditions picked up from mumbling medicine men, professing to be “private information” about facts. To bed and had a much worse night than I have had for a long time.’

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But Lewis’s spiritual biography of the next few years will be dealt with fully in the next chapter: in 1927 he was still trying to ‘live by philosophy’ – like A.C. Bradley in The Masque of Balliol he was still seeking refuge ‘in the blessed Absolute’. His diary writing was, however, growing more and more sporadic, and it was, he said, his acceptance of Theism which ‘cured me of the time-wasting and foolish practice of keeping a diary’.

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Meanwhile his outer life at Oxford continued much on the lines of any other don. Though still superior to and contemptuous of the average philistine undergraduates – ‘a drinking, guffawing cry of barbarians with hardly any taste among them’

(#ulink_4ab524a4-d00a-543a-bc25-703b9dfd560a) – he performed what seemed his duties to them with conscientious thoroughness. Evenings were given up to reading and debating societies; he attended parties given by his pupils – one of these by John Betjeman on 24 January 1927 in his rooms in St Aldates – ‘a very beautiful panelled room looking across to the side of the House’, he recorded.

I found myself pitchforked into a galaxy of super-undergraduates, including Sparrow

(#ulink_6a9a0e68-33a6-57c1-ab59-fe528759d259)of the Nonesuch Press and an absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly person called McNiece,

(#ulink_8eab21b3-8881-5645-b3a2-24f077adf74e)of whom Betjeman saidafterwards, ‘He doesn’t say much, but he’s a great poet’. It reminded me of the man in Boswell ‘who was always thinking of Locke and Newton’. This silent bard comes from Belfast or rather Carrickfergus. The conversation was chiefly about lace curtains, arts and crafts (which they all dislike), china ornaments, silver versus earthen teapots, architecture, and the strange habits of ‘hearties’. The best thing was Betjeman’s very curious collection of books. Came away with him and back to college to pull him along through Wulfstan until dinner time.

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Certainly Lewis did not find himself at home among the brittle young world of what he was later to describe as ‘The Empty Twenties’ – but there was some truth in a moment of self-recognition recorded the previous year: ‘Was led somehow into a train of thought in which I made the unpleasant discovery that I am becoming a prig – righteous indignation against certain modern affectations has its dangers, yet I don’t know how to avoid it either.’

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Warnie was setting off for Shanghai on 11 April 1927, where he would remain with the Royal Army Service Corps for almost three years. Warnie was becoming part of Jack’s Oxford family and after a night there he left in a rather nostalgic mood. ‘The bus,’ he wrote in his diary on 7 April, ‘did not start at once, and I watched Jack in his mac and old cloth hat stride along until he was out of sight.’

(#ulink_9f83059e-2a7c-5a83-a5d2-9fb0a103de9f) He had visited Ireland briefly the week before to see his father – for the last time, as it turned out.

Lewis stopped writing a regular diary at this time, though he continued to record his activities in an occasional journal to Warnie. For part at least of the following year he kept a diary in Anglo-Saxon, none of which seems to have survived except a literal translation of the account of the election of George Gordon to succeed Sir Herbert Warren as President of Magdalen in 1928.

In the first of the diary-letters to his brother, the section dated 26 April, Lewis described a walking tour with Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood and Walter ‘Wof’ Field

(#ulink_1981f6d0-bbeb-5b67-bece-b9aebcb17704) to Marlborough and Salisbury Plain. This was always his favourite form of holiday and he continued to make such tours until his mid-fifties when failing health put an end to them, his most frequent companion in later years being his brother and their most usual venue the north of Ireland during the Long Vacation.

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Apart from longer or shorter walks and thoughts on the books he was reading, Lewis had little news to impart either to his father or to his brother at this time. Albert Lewis’s health was beginning to cause anxiety, and Jack exerted himself to be entertaining in his letters, quoting amusing schoolboy howlers from the examination papers he was again correcting that summer, and telling anecdotes of the more eccentric dons with whom he came in contact. There is an occasional illuminating remark about himself: ‘Like all us Celts,’ he wrote on 29 July, ‘I am a born rhetorician, one who finds pleasure in the expression of forcible emotions independently of their grounds and even to the extent to which they are felt at any time save the moment of speaking.’

(#ulink_dc1f091e-cb6c-5024-a7c1-03307e12ea67) And the same letter concludes, ‘I am going bald at a prodigious rate and in a few years time you will have a better head of hair than either of your sons.’

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In September Lewis was on holiday with Mrs Moore and Maureen at Perranporth in Cornwall and wrote an ecstatic account of the surf-bathing to Warnie. He tore himself away from the delights of the seaside for a visit to his father. ‘Jack arrived, bright and cheerful and amusing as usual,’

(#ulink_9761df75-a701-59a5-9121-27c32e1e0fbe) recorded Albert Lewis in his diary. But the Cornish trip ‘was not official and should not be referred to in letters’ to their father, he instructed Warnie.

This year Lewis began learning the language of the Sagas: ‘it is an exciting experience when I remember my first passion for things Norse,’ he wrote in his diary on 8 February 1927.

(#ulink_66d5098d-86c8-52d5-964a-56d52d7406eb) He described the experience to Arthur Greeves in a letter of 26 June:

I am realizing a number of very old dreams in the way of books – reading Sir Gawain in the original

(#ulink_96b89eb2-eb2f-575d-adf9-afdc28bd728c)and, above all, learning Old Icelandic. We have a little Icelandic Club in Oxford called the ‘Kolbítar’: which means (literally) ‘coal-biters’, i.e. an Icelandic word for old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals. We have so far read the Younger Edda and the Volsung Saga: next term we shall read the Laxdale Saga. You will be able to imagine what a delight this is to me, and how, even in turning over the pages of my Icelandic Dictionary, the mere name of god or giant catching my eye will sometimes throw me back fifteen years into a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music: only they are now even more beautiful seen through a haze of memory.

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