In the days when Lewis kept a diary and his father filed away both his and Warnie’s incoming letters, it was easy to follow him chronologically. But from 1931 onwards not only was the continuity broken, but Lewis was tending more and more to divide his life into compartments that occasionally could only be described accurately as watertight. His home life became more and more separated from his life in Magdalen. One could be a constant visitor to him in college without ever having been to The Kilns. And it was a perpetual surprise to some of his closest friends to discover other friends of his equally close of whom he had never even spoken.
To pupils and younger friends Lewis was simply a bachelor don living in college rooms. Pupils would be invited in twos or threes to stimulating – some found it ‘overwhelming’ – talk in his rooms after Hall of an evening, where they would be regaled with port, beer and the inevitable pot of strong tea.
Even when he was known only as a tutor, and as the author of The Allegory of Love, Lewis was so good a lecturer that undergraduates who usually avoided as many lectures as possible attended his, made sure of completing the course (which usually meant two lectures a week for six weeks) – and sometimes came again when Lewis repeated the series.
Lewis lectured almost entirely from a written text; but he would add to this, both during the lectures with additional examples or explanations, and in the basic text before delivering the course again where further research or later criticism made this desirable. There were also lighter moments: good laughs which he timed with an actor’s skill, and knew from previous experience when to build up to them. For example, in the ‘Prolegomena to Medieval Studies’ (which formed the basis, much later, of The Discarded Image), he described the various types of men born under the different planetary influences: when he came to Jupiter, ‘the Jovial character is cheerful, festive; those born under Jupiter are apt to be loud-voiced and red-faced – it is obvious under which planet I was born!’ always produced its laugh.
On one occasion during the war, when the audience at his lectures came to consist predominantly of women, and these tended more and more to come without their academic gowns (which were still statutory wear at lectures), Lewis strode into the hall at his usual speed, but did not begin to lecture when he had deposited his notes on the lectern. Instead, he gazed slowly up and down the crowded tables with a blank stare until, like Mr Puff, he had produced ‘a proper expectation in the audience’; then, with his usual perfect timing, he exclaimed, ‘Oh! I must apologize for wearing a gown!’ At the next lecture gowns were in fashion again.
Whether one had read any of his works or not, the first sight of C.S. Lewis was always a surprise. One undergraduate just initiated to lecturers as varied as Tolkien, Edmund Blunden* and Lascelles Abercrombie, remembers the shock as he sat for the first time in the hall at Magdalen in October 1938 and there strode in a big man with a large red face and shabby clothes, looking like nothing so much as a prosperous butcher, who began addressing his audience in a loud, booming voice and with tremendous gusto.
Of course one soon got over this first impression when Lewis began lecturing. It was obvious even in such utilitarian lectures as his two ‘Prolegomena’ series (to ‘Medieval Literature’ and ‘Renaissance Literature’) that one was listening not merely to a scholar of immense erudition, but to a lover of literature who had read every text he mentioned, had enjoyed most of them, and was eager to share both his knowledge and his enthusiasm with anyone whom he could persuade to do so.
Lewis was popularly supposed to regard both lectures and tutorials as a complete waste of his valuable time, and to hold undergraduates in the uttermost contempt. But even if these assumptions had been correct, no one could deny that he gave more fully and conscientiously than most tutors of the very best that he could give.
Perhaps the impression of not wasting more time than was absolutely necessary was given by the fact that Lewis did indeed seek to exemplify Kipling’s dictum about filling ‘the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run’.1 He lectured for precisely three-quarters of an hour, and he never waited to answer questions. Two minutes before the end of the lecture he would quietly gather his notes together, return the watch that he had borrowed from the nearest member of his audience, and prepare to leave – lecturing all the time. Then, as he finished his last sentence, he would step off the dais and stride down the hall at top speed. If he was at all late in arriving at the lecture, he would begin it even before he entered the hall: several times the great voice came booming up the steps outside the hall door and Lewis would enter in haste, lecturing vigorously.
Lewis never wore a watch; and in the Michaelmas Term of 1938, as was his habit, he borrowed one from the nearest undergraduate. This chanced to be Roger Lancelyn Green, who sat almost at his feet and sported an obvious pocket watch and chain – and only he would know, as the watch was unobtrusively returned to him, that the lecture was ending. But not by the wildest stretch of imagination could Green have dreamt that twenty-five years later the book built out of those lectures to which he was listening with such interest would be dedicated to him.
Lewis’s knowledge certainly seemed prodigious. Every quotation that was not originally in English was given in the correct language, followed by a translation: Old Norse, Old and Middle English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian – even Old Welsh, though that was probably the only one of these languages which he would not have been able to read unseen with ease. His interest was in the written rather than the spoken word, and on the way to Greece in 1960 when the plane was forced down at Naples by bad weather, he made no attempt to talk Italian, beyond the few bare words needed to procure a bottle of Chianti; and in Greece itself he made no attempt to learn even the odd phrase in Modern Greek, though during an enforced wait he picked up a local paper and was soon eagerly translating as much as his knowledge of the ancient language enabled him to do – and was earnestly working out how the meanings of words had changed (‘nero for water, instead of hudor: ah, of course! nero from the Nereids!’), and what certain new or obscure words could mean.
Another undergraduate who became Lewis’s pupil remembers his interview for a demyship at Magdalen in March 1941, and ‘the plump, cheerful man, with a large red countryman’s face, and a loud voice, who rolled his r’s, and who asked most of the questions’. And when Derek Brewer* had been accepted by the college and written to ask his future tutor what he should read before coming up in October, Lewis had replied with a long letter of good advice: certain relevant Latin works (to be read in the Loeb edition with the English on the opposite page); ‘a fairly sound Biblical background is assumed by most of the older English writers: if you lack this, acquire it’; and concluded: ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton are certainties whatever shortened course or ordinary course you take. Next to these in importance come Malory, Spenser, Donne, Browne, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Johnson, Wordsworth. After that it becomes more a matter of taste. The great thing is to be always reading but not to get bored – treat it not like work, more as a vice! Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.’
Derek Brewer came into residence for a year in Michaelmas Term 1941 – and found Oxford still itself as far as English literature was concerned. Lewis rarely suggested ‘any critical books, and in those days there were indeed few that were much good. Neither he nor anyone else ever mentioned to me such names as I.A. Richards or F.R. Leavis. Nor did Lewis ever mention his own work’ – though the days of decline were even then at hand when freshers on coming up would inquire who their examiners were to be, and then make a point of reading and digesting anything they had written. For Lewis, true to the great tradition of English scholarship, concentrated always ‘on actual texts and their historical meaning, rather than on modern critical books’, and was never fully convinced that any Oxford tutor could fall so low as to teach the tenets of cultural disintegration which he sought to discredit in The Abolition of Man.
In 1947 Derek Brewer returned to take up his interrupted course, and records that
in those crowded days just after the War Lewis gave tutorials from 10 to 1 and 5 to 7 (apart from one or two lectures), from Monday to Friday. A heavy load … He had a set of rooms in the middle of the handsome eighteenth-century New Buildings at Magdalen. The high-ceilinged principal room faced north over the deer-park, and we met there in groups for Old English translation and occasionally for individual tutorials. A door led off to a bedroom, and another to a small inner room, with windows looking south to the rest of the College, where Lewis kept his books, and we often had tutorials. All the furniture was very shabby. A large table filled the middle of the main room, where he wrote, with wooden chairs around, and there were a couple of battered armchairs by the marble fireplace in which we sat opposite each other for tutorials. There was always a smell of pipe-tobacco. My most vivid memory of Lewis in this room is during the great freeze-up in the winter of 1947, when there was no heating,* and he sat in his armchair fully clothed, with a dressing-gown on top, and on top of that a blanket which came up over his head like a cowl. It was rather like medieval castles, he said, where you put on extra clothes when you came inside, as Gawain did in the great Middle-English poem of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
The general form of the tutorial was simple. First, after two or three minutes of general conversation, one read the essay. The reading of this, and the effort of composition were, if done seriously, the major part of a full week’s work that included preparation of translation and attendance at lectures. Reading the essay usually took me about ten minutes. Lewis listened with extreme intentness, not, I am all too sure, because of the fascination of my words, but because it was his duty. Once, in the middle of an essay, the ’phone rang. I stopped and he answered it in the other room. When he returned after a five-minute interruption he repeated verbatim my last sentence as far as it had got. He had an astonishing verbatim memory, and could repeat chunks of prose to illustrate a point arising in discussion. Given any line in Paradise Lost he could usually continue with the next line.2
Warnie Lewis comments also in his Memoir on his brother’s amazing memory, which he put down to ‘the long years of grinding self-inflicted poverty which had made it second nature to him never to buy a book if he could master its contents without doing so’. Even in later years when his own works were bringing in large royalties, Lewis seldom bought books, and had completely lost his early love of fine editions, handmade paper and the other desiderata of the true bibliophile. On one occasion Green tried to give him a copy of George MacDonald’s first book – a first edition inscribed by MacDonald to his wife’s sister: but Lewis refused it, saying that he already had Within and Without (1855) in the cheap reprint of MacDonald’s Collected Poems (1892), and took no interest in first editions or association copies. This even went so far as his own manuscripts were concerned – which he used as scrap paper as soon as typescripts had been made for the publisher. Green found that notes about one of his own books were written on the backs of two odd pages of an early version of Miracles: had he realized in time that Lewis treated even his completed manuscripts in this way, he would have tried to save one from the general destruction!
Apart from necessary work books and essential texts, Lewis’s meagrely populated shelves looked as if they had been stocked entirely from ‘the fourpenny box’ – and in fact many of the sets: the ‘Border’ Scott, the ‘Gadshill’ Dickens, the ‘Swanston’ Stevenson, and so on, the titles almost illegible on their faded spines, probably came from his father’s store of books at Little Lea. To these he was always pleased to add cheap volumes of fiction or copies of his friends’ books: while refusing gifts of first editions as such from Green, he was delighted with spare copies of books new to him by such mutual favourites as Rider Haggard, F. Anstey and E. Nesbit – and was blissfully unaware when a really rare volume that he happened to want slipped in among them.
But to return to Derek Brewer’s recollections of tutorials with Lewis:
As I read the essay, he made notes. Many of these were minute points of verbal structure, rhythm, clarity, precision. In general Lewis had a Johnsonian literalism. He always claimed to be baffled by the phrase, too often applied to Chaucer, ‘with tongue in cheek’, and would put it to comic visual effect. Such literalism, both on this small scale, and more generally in his whole outlook, was a very important part of his criticism, his religion, and the Socratic faux-naïveté that he often used in argument. To return to the essay, if he started to doodle I knew I was being boring. When the essay was finished he first gave a general word or two of judgement. One week I surpassed myself on Shakespeare’s tragedies, and rejoiced in high praise. Next I thought I had produced something equally stunning, a judicious condemnation of the late romances. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘I couldn’t disagree more.’ He was a ‘romance critic’, not (as most modern critics are) a ‘tragedy critic’. After a general comment or two he usually pointed out the small-scale deficiencies of the essay, not at all in a captious way. Then we discussed the principal points made, and any other things to be said about the texts. This was almost always delightfully interesting. He had a vivid response to the most various texts, a ready penetrating comment and wit. One of his most notable characteristics as a man as well as a tutor was his generous acceptance of variety and difference, sure of his own standards but tolerant of others, and of failings. Add to this an almost inexhaustible interest in literature and ideas.
It would be easy to continue with recollections of Lewis as a tutor, for he had so many articulate pupils, from John Betjeman to Kenneth Tynan* and John Wain,† and so many who ranked high in the ranks of English studies – John Lawlor, R.T. Davies, Derek Brewer and many more – that one must stand for all in the present case, though several of them have published excellent descriptions and assessments.
But, as John Lawlor has pointed out, ‘the plain fact is that he hated teaching’.3 In his earlier years as a tutor Lewis was disappointed and frustrated by the poor numbers of students reading English, which made it necessary for him to continue for some time giving tutorials in philosophy and even political science; too few even of his English pupils rose above the mediocre (to one of his outstanding powers), and,
Where he could not strike fire, he tended to accept with ironic resignation; but it did not endear teaching to him. Thirdly – and I have, I believe, kept the true order of importance – Lewis valued time as few men I have met, before or since, have done. After an early breakfast and a walk, nine o’clock in Term time would see him seated at his writing-table, wooden penholder and steel nib moving steadily over the page until the ten o’clock pupil knocked on his door. ‘The hungry generations tread thee down’ was a witticism he ruefully acknowledged. No man was better equipped for silent industry, hour upon hour … To Lewis, tutorial work was a school of patience; and if one was ever disappointed that one’s best things had gone unregarded, one was also conscious that one’s best wasn’t good enough to feed and sustain his most remarkable mind. The effect of this was that a good many of Lewis’s pupils, including the very best of them, were reduced to silence or, worse, incoherence when dealing with him …4
Lewis had something of this numbing effect on others besides pupils. Apart from the odd word at lectures, Green met him for the first time in November 1939 when he was asked to coffee and port one evening. There were several others present, probably Lewis’s brighter pupils, and the talk was so scintillating and rarefied that Green sat a mute and overawed spectator – and was never asked again. In March 1944, having been Lewis’s pupil at a series of B.Litt. classes on textual criticism and having also met him once or twice under other circumstances, Green called on him early one evening to show him a letter from Gordon Bottomley* about the recently published Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’. Under the circumstances Lewis cannot have resented having his time broken into, and he talked in friendly fashion for half an hour. But as his visitor was leaving, he suddenly boomed out: ‘Green! How old are you now?’ ‘Twenty-five, sir.’ ‘Ah! A sad age to reach! You will never again be able to read one of the great epics of the world for the first time!’ Green left hurriedly lest his opinion should be asked on Ariosto or Camoëns.
But Lewis was famous – or notorious – for such devastating remarks, which were too often reported maliciously as examples of his contempt for young people and his delight in scoring off them. In fact they were made in absolute good faith: Lewis simply found it impossible to realize or to remember that most of his hearers were infinitely less well read than he was, or to follow the workings of the average second-class mind. At a mixed dinner-party he had been heard to fire a sudden, petrifying question at one of the youngest women present – and then, as it were, to remember, and turn whatever answer she managed to stammer out into the gambit for a scintillating discourse – of which he was able skilfully to suggest that she was the originator. One of Lewis’s pupils, Thomas Stock, said that those who insisted on pitting their wits against Lewis found that they either managed to hold themselves just barely erect when the full force of his rational opposition struck or they were knocked flat. ‘To argue with Lewis,’ said Mr Stock, ‘was like entering a beauty contest. You had to be prepared to be told “You’re damned ugly”.’
He learnt what might be called mental charity more slowly than any other virtue – and it became most notable in his later years and particularly after his marriage. But he never outgrew the teachings of ‘the Great Knock’. As he says of him in Surprised by Joy, ‘the most casual remark was taken as a summons to disputation’,5 and so it was with Lewis himself. If a friend made a thoughtless remark or a loose generality in conversation, Lewis would boom out, ‘I challenge that!’ and the foils of logic would be clashing in a moment – thrust, parry and riposte, his eyes positively sparkling at the skilful play of words until one could almost hear the click and slide of pliant steel upon steel – and indeed the final thrust, given or very occasionally received, would often be accompanied by a joyous ‘Touché!’
Naturally Lewis’s relations with his fellow members of Magdalen Senior Common Room varied over the thirty years of his residence in college. In Surprised by Joy he pays particular tribute to ‘five great Magdalen men who enlarged my very idea of what a learned life should be – P.V.M. Benecke,* C.C.J. Webb,* J.A. Smith,† F.E. Brightman‡ and C.T. Onions … In my earlier years at Magdalen I inhabited a world where hardly anything I wanted to know needed to be found out by my own unaided efforts. One or other of these could always give you a clue … I found as always that the ripest are kindest to the raw and the most studious have most time to spare.’6 But as early as 10 July 1928 he was writing to his father:
I am almost ashamed to tell you – I am beginning to be rather disillusioned about my colleagues. There is a good deal more intrigue and mutual back-scratching and even direct lying than I ever supposed possible … Of course it may simply be that, being rather an innocent in practical matters myself, and having been deceived once or twice, I have rushed too hastily to conclusions. But the bad thing is that the decent men seem to me to be all the old ones (who will die) and the rotters seem to be all the young ones (who will last my time).7
However mistaken he may have been in the main, this rather jaundiced view of college politics, ‘the Magdalen junta’ and other ‘inner rings’ gave Lewis a good background for what might happen in a Senior Common Room where ‘the rotters’ really did gain control, as vividly imagined and described in the first chapter of That Hideous Strength (1945). In actual fact, although during his earlier years as a Fellow Lewis undoubtedly got on better with his seniors, he was also to make lasting friendships among the younger Fellows, notably with Colin Hardie the classics scholar.§ Nevertheless he continued to pay that deference to the old which, he maintained, was growing more and more out of fashion in the modern world. One noticed, for example, the gentleness and patience he showed to Professor Arthur Lee Dixon,* whose mind was beginning to wander in his very last year, and with what tact and skill he would draw him out to talk of the days when Lewis Carroll employed him as temporary mathematics tutor at Christ Church, or when in the 1890s as a Fellow of Merton he was visited unexpectedly by Andrew Lang who had previously occupied the same rooms.
Canon Adam Fox,† who became a Fellow of Magdalen in 1929, recollected forming a breakfast quartet with Lewis, Benecke and J.A. Smith: ‘If my recollection is correct he never read the newspaper in Common Room himself.’ (Lewis, in fact, never read the paper at all: he would skim the headlines of The Times and sometimes do the crossword.)
I seem to think that in the earlier years, when he was struggling out of atheism into the Church, he rarely came to breakfast at all. But from about 1933 he attended Chapel regularly, and came in from it with Benecke and myself about 8.15 to join J.A. … Lewis was the first to leave us. There was a touch of haste without hurry about his attitude to breakfast. He was anxious to get back to his work and have a little time at something congenial before the pupils arrived … On Fridays our Chapel Service consisted of the Litany, which in the Book of Common Prayer contains three substantial suffrages for the Sovereign and another for his family. As we came into Common Room one Friday Lewis commented: ‘That Litany makes one feel as if the Royal Family were not pulling their weight.’8
Later, when fame began to swell his correspondence, Lewis always employed the hour or so between breakfast and his first pupil in concentrated letter writing; he also found time for a walk, usually before chapel, or perhaps sometimes in lieu of it, round Addison’s Walk, the Magdalen meadow within the college bounds. But, with Adam Fox,
we must come back to him at breakfast in Common Room. I think he had a great respect for Benecke, but he had a real reverence for J.A., though both respect and reverence were mingled with some amusement. He had not many interests in common with Benecke, nothing to give or to receive about the College or about Music or about ancient history, in which Benecke had been tutor for many years in the past; and Benecke was in any case too modest to sustain a lively debate. But Lewis was a philosopher as well as a man of letters, and as such able to bring out J.A. much better, and make him show his paces. He asked him enticing questions and chaffed him not a little in an affectionate way. In me Lewis found someone much devoted to poetry as a reader but not as a student. I looked to him for information and opinion, but I must often have asked the wrong question. He sometimes surprised me, as when he named Dante as the best example of ‘pure poetry’. He did not often quote poetry, at any rate so early in the morning.9
Canon Fox was struck by the way in which Lewis
was notably detached from this world and yet made so great an impact on it. His innocence and ignorance were unlimited. He took a very slight interest in what was going on round about him in our little academic world. Some current discussion about College or University affairs which had been in everybody’s mind and on everybody else’s lips passed him by, though when at last he heard of it, he often made a very sound observation slightly tinged with petulance. About some proposed changes in the tutorial system which tended to exalt the Faculties at the expense of the Colleges he remarked ‘We shall soon be just the Staff’, an anticipation not far from the truth.10
Lewis had very definite ideas about university education and the proper relation between tutor and student. ‘The student is, or ought to be,’ he said in an essay on ‘Our English Syllabus’, ‘a young man who is already beginning to follow learning for its own sake, and who attaches himself to an older student, not precisely to be taught, but to pick up what he can.’11 Comparing education with training, he said in the same essay, ‘if education is beaten by training, civilization dies’.12 And by civilization he meant ‘humanity’, ‘by which I do not mean kindness so much as the realization of the human idea. Human life means to me the life of beings for whom the leisured activities of thought, art, literature, conversation are the end, and the preservation and propagation of life merely the means. That is why education seems to me so important: it actualizes that potentiality for leisure, if you like for amateurishness, which is man’s prerogative.’13
In the obituary she wrote for Lewis to the British Academy, Helen Gardner said:
Perhaps one of the most significant of his contributions to the study of English Literature at Oxford was the part he played with his friend Professor J.R.R. Tolkien in establishing a syllabus for the Final Honour School which embodied his belief in the value of medieval (especially Old English) literature, his conviction that a proper study of modern literature required the linguistic training that the study of earlier literature gave, and his sense of the continuity of English literature and the syllabus, which remained in force for over twenty years, was in many ways an admirable one.14
‘The tap-root, Anglo-Saxon, can never be abandoned’, wrote Lewis in ‘Our English Syllabus’. ‘The man who does not know it remains all his life a child among real English students. There we find the speech-rhythms that we use every day made the basis of metre; there we find the origins of that romanticism for which the ignorant invent such odd explanations. This is our own stuff and its life is in every branch of the tree to the remotest twigs. That we cannot abandon.’15
The only drawback to the English syllabus that Lewis created was the failure to find space for the literature of the Victorian age, ‘1830–1900’ being added merely as an optional paper – which only about five per cent of candidates took, and for which they received little help either from tutors or lecturers. ‘This meant’, concluded Helen Gardner, ‘that in the period when Victorian Literature was coming into the domain of scholarship, Oxford made virtually no contribution to the development of techniques of dealing with the problems presented by this vast, untidy period of genius.’16
Lewis had, of course, no bias against post-1830 literature, indeed the period included authors whom he considered among the ‘very great’ such as Morris and Kipling. He had read some at least of the works even of authors whom he did not admire, such as Henry James and D.H. Lawrence, and he could quote or refer to them knowledgeably on occasion. Lewis did not enjoy the Restoration dramatists either, and Nevill Coghill has recorded that he never heard him quote from any of them.17 But on one occasion at least he quoted Congreve very appositely to Green, and he certainly discussed Dryden’s plays with him, though he did not cross Magdalen Grove to see the Oxford University Dramatic Society perform Marriage-à-la-Mode there. But this was in accordance with his lack of interest in the theatre itself, and his surprising assertion that to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream (acted under his windows in Magdalen Grove in 1942) performed in the open air would spoil it for him: if he was to see it at all, it would have more magic for him in a theatre. But, like Hazlitt, he preferred to read Shakespeare’s plays rather than see them acted.
He did, of course, visit the theatre occasionally, particularly to see all or part of the Ring cycle. His first experience was on 14 June 1918, a few weeks after he returned from the front line. Sir Thomas Beecham was conducting The Valkyrie, and writing to Arthur Greeves afterwards Lewis said, ‘The dream of years has been realized, and without disillusionment … You have my verdict that if the Ring is all like this it quite comes up to our old dreams, and that all Italian opera is merely a pastime compared with the great music-drama of Wagner.’18
After this he saw The Ring whenever there was an opportunity, and woe betide the man whose responsibility it was to acquire tickets for this event and failed. In 1934 Lewis planned to see The Ring with Owen Barfield, Tolkien, Warnie and Cecil Harwood, and the responsibility for purchasing the tickets fell on Harwood. Harwood forgot, the great opportunity was missed, and it brought forth one of Lewis’s most Johnsonesque letters. He wrote to Harwood on 7 May 1934:
I have read your pathetical letter with such sentiments as it naturally suggests and write to assure you that you need expect from me no ungenerous reproach. It would be cruel, if it were possible, and impossible, if it were attempted, to add to the mortification which you must now be supposed to suffer. Where I cannot console, it is far from my purpose to aggravate: for it is part of the complicated misery of your state that while I pity your sufferings, I cannot innocently wish them lighter … As soon as you can, pray let me know through some respectable acquaintance what plans you have framed for the future. In what quarter of the globe do you intend to sustain that irrevocable exile, hopeless penury, and perpetual disgrace to which you have condemned yourself? Do not give in to the sin of Despair: learn from this example the fatal consequences of error and hope, in some humbler station and some distant land, that you may yet become useful to your species.19
Although the literature of the previous hundred years was not taught in Oxford in Lewis’s day, he was as keenly interested in it as any modern student, and more widely read than most. Though not an enthusiastic reader of the more psychological type of novel, and expressing almost as little interest in Fielding and Smollett as in the dramatists of their period, he was an enthusiastic reader of Jane Austen, whose novels he reread again and again. He read Scott with equal enthusiasm, but was more temperate in his admiration for Dickens, and cared much less for Thackeray and George Eliot; Hardy and Henry James he admired but did not enjoy, and he had even less use for Lawrence and Joyce. He proclaimed Kipling to be the greatest prose writer of their generation – though with the reservations detailed in his lecture on ‘Kipling’s World’.20 Nevertheless he was greatly impressed by the Russians, and thought War and Peace the greatest novel ever written.
He seemed to know all the greater poets of the nineteenth century well – and probably knew the majority of minor poets to some extent. A chance conversation proved, for example, that he had read and could often quote from most of the Lang – Henley – Dobson group, and that he was well versed in the ‘Georgians’ – among whom, indeed, ‘Clive Hamilton’ should probably be classed. Perhaps on account of this affinity he ranked Yeats, Bridges and Masefield among the major poets, and spoke in praise of de la Mare. But, as we have seen, he struggled to come to terms with ‘modern’ poetry. Most ‘modern poetry’ was a ‘cult engineered by cranks with money, via Horizon’, he remarked in 1949 at a lunch party where his guests included Ruth Pitter* and Owen Barfield, and he went on to maintain that ‘they could engineer a “Romantic Revival” themselves – if they had the money to start and run a paper’.
Lewis had been approached three years earlier by Laurence Whistler* who, in association with Andrew Young,† was hoping to found a periodical to challenge Horizon, and already had Ruth Pitter and Richard Church in favour of the scheme, with T.S. Eliot ‘sitting on the fence, metaphorically’.21 Lewis was enthusiastic about the idea. ‘I am pleased, to the point of being excited, by your suggestion’, he wrote to Whistler on 9 January 1947:
I have said again and again that what we very badly need is a new, frankly high-brow periodical not in the hands of the Left. I have usually added ‘If only we could find a right-minded capitalist.’ Money, I take it, is the first essential. I entirely agree that it should not be specifically Christian, much less Anglican: the Tao (in that sense) is to be the ring fence. In almost all existing periodicals one knows in advance how a certain book will be reviewed: the personal and political bias is no longer even disguised. That is what must be avoided.22
Lewis was not able to be present at the second meeting on 9 May 1947 but sent a ‘memorandum’, the most relevant section of which reads:
I think the Periodical ought to come before the public with no explicitly religious pretensions at all; its offer should be simply an offer of good poems, good stories, good articles, and good reviews. On the other hand, those who run it should in fact all be Christians. The standard they actually apply in admitting or rejecting contributions should not be that of agreement or disagreement with the Christian Faith, but that of agreement or disagreement with what may be called the ‘good Pagan’ range of rationality and virtue. Thus while many, perhaps most, contributors would be explicitly Christian, we would freely admit good work which was not, and might even admit work opposed to the Faith provided the opposition was based on appeal to reason and ethics. What would be definitely and always excluded (a) Total Scepticism: i.e. attacks on reason and natural morality. (b) Pornography, however high brow. (c) Cynicism and Sadism however well disguised as ‘Realism’. Thus, if they were all now alive, we should admit Aristotle (but not Heraclitus), Lucretius (but not Petronius), Voltaire (but not Anatole France), Hardy (but not Oscar Wilde) …23
‘Nothing came of the idea,’ wrote Laurence Whistler, ‘probably because there was no general agreement; certainly because there was no money; and I suspect because it was thought, despite our disclaimers, that Young and I really did want to run it. C.S. Lewis believed us, I think, or he would not have been enthusiastic, but I doubt if some of the others did.’24 And so Portico never opened.
Indeed Lewis, with his loathing and distrust of ‘inner rings’, could never have been comfortable for long in what must have developed to some extent into a clique, however open a ring-fence was designed for it. His interests were too wide and his tastes too individual – and he was essentially too modest a man – to set himself up as the head of any kind of literary ‘school’, or even to gather one about him.
Nothing could be less like a ‘mutual admiration society’ than the club that gathered round Lewis – the Inklings. The origins of it are indistinct but the chief impetus behind it was Lewis’s delight in hearing things read aloud. The first to share this with him was Owen Barfield. From the time they met in 1919 they began meeting to read aloud and criticize their poetry. Even after Barfield left Oxford in 1930 to work in London they met when they could to discuss their writings or to engage in that ‘rational opposition’ they both liked so much.
Then came J.R.R. Tolkien who, from 1929, began going to Lewis’s college rooms for late-night talk following meetings of the Kolbítar. It was at these late-night sessions that Tolkien would read aloud the stories and histories he was writing about his invented world of Middle-Earth, later to be published as The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. By 1930 they were meeting regularly in Lewis’s rooms on Monday mornings.
According to Professor Tolkien, the Inklings developed from a literary society of that name founded in University College in the Thirties by an undergraduate called Edward Tangye Lean* who wished to have a few senior members and was able to interest both Lewis and Tolkien. Lewis and Lean had met as fellow members of the Martlets before Lean invited them to join the Inklings. Meetings took place in Lean’s college rooms, and, said Tolkien, ‘its procedure was that at each meeting members should read aloud unpublished compositions. These were supposed to be open to immediate criticism.’25 The name ‘Inkling’ was a kind of pun: the usual meaning of having a distant notion of something doubling with some such recollection of a scribbler and his works as the ‘paper pellets of inky boys’ in Kipling’s Stalky & Co. It was probably intended to be a modern version of the famous Scriblerus Club of very similar constitution whose original members were Pope, Swift, Gay, Arbuthnot and Parnell. Tolkien continues of the Inklings:
The Club soon died, but C.S.L. and I at least survived. Its name 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 in Magdalen. Although our habit was to read aloud compositions of various kinds (and lengths!), this association and its habit would in fact have come into being at this time, whether the original short-lived club had ever existed or not. C.S.L. had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a facility in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends.26
We have no record of what Lewis read to Lean’s club, but Tolkien remembered that one of the unpublished works he read to the club was his poem ‘Errantry’, afterwards published in The Oxford Magazine.27 Meanwhile, Lewis read on his own a longer work by Tolkien – The Hobbit, which Tolkien had begun in 1930. In a letter to Arthur Greeves of 4 February 1933, Lewis said: ‘Reading his fairy tale has been uncanny – it is so exactly like what we would both have longed to write (or read) in 1916: so that one feels he is not making it up but merely describing the same world into which all three of us have the entry.’28
It wasn’t long before Lewis and Tolkien were joined by Hugo Dyson. He was still teaching at Reading University, but they saw him when he was in Oxford. When he was elected to a fellowship in English at Merton College in 1945 he became a regular member. By the mid-1930s ‘our own club’, as Lewis called it, was meeting on Thursday evenings during term in Lewis’s college rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the back parlour of the Eagle and Child pub in St Giles, Oxford, commonly known as the ‘Bird and Baby’ – though the inn-sign over the door shows Ganymede as quite a ‘lusty juvenile’. Here Lewis was usually to be found from 11.30 a.m. to 1 p.m. on most Tuesdays. The regularity of these meetings was even noticed in a popular detective novel of the time, Edmund Crispin’s Swan Song (1947). In Chapter 8 Crispin’s hero, Gervase Fen, and others are sitting at a table near the entrance of the ‘Bird and Baby’ discussing a murder. ‘“There goes C.S. Lewis,” said Fen suddenly. “It must be Tuesday.”’
Warnie became a regular member when he retired from the Army in 1932, and his diary was to become one of the chief sources of information about this remarkable gathering. The Inklings had no constitution or committee, but was simply a group of friends who met to discuss literary matters and read for criticism the latest instalments of work which they happened to have in progress: ‘membership’ was solely a matter of invitation. Others who joined in the 1930s were Adam Fox, by then Dean of Divinity at Magdalen; Nevill Coghill, Fellow of English at Exeter College since 1925; and Lord David Cecil,* Fellow of English at Wadham College and later New College. Helping Tolkien with the teaching of Anglo-Saxon was Charles Leslie Wrenn, who joined the group in the mid-thirties.*
By the time The Hobbit was published in 1937, Tolkien had begun work on the next, and greatest, of his books, The Lord of the Rings. The Inklings heard chapters of what they called ‘the new Hobbit book’ read aloud at their meetings. Meanwhile, Tolkien and Lewis were planning a joint project. Dissatisfied with much they found in modern stories, they decided to write stories of their own. They liked tales that were ‘mythopoeic’ – having the quality of myth – and the plan was to disguise theirs as thrillers. Tolkien wrote The Lost Road29 – a story of a journey through time – while Lewis saw this as an opportunity to put into effect a technique which became the hallmark of his novels – a ‘Supposal’. Suppose there are rational creatures on other planets? Suppose they are unfallen? The result was his first science-fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). When Tolkien recommended it to his publishers, Allen & Unwin, on 18 February 1938 he mentioned that, besides hearing it read aloud himself, ‘I have since heard it pass a rather 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.’30 Shortly before Out of the Silent Planet was published Lewis began writing The Problem of Pain, another book read to and commented on by the Inklings.
Warnie was recalled to the Army at the outbreak of war in September 1939, but that year ushered in one of their most important recruits. This was Charles Williams, who had read the proofs of Lewis’s Allegory of Love for the Oxford University Press and whose ‘theological thrillers’ Lewis enjoyed so much. Williams was among the staff that Oxford University Press transferred to Southfield House in Oxford a few days before war was declared against Germany. On 7 September he moved into 9 South Parks Road, while Mrs Williams and their son, Michael, remained in London. Lewis was delighted to see Williams and lost no time in inviting him to become an Inkling. Beginning in September 1939, said Lewis, ‘we met one another about twice a week, sometimes more: nearly always on Thursday evenings in my rooms and on Tuesday mornings in the best of all public houses for draught cider, whose name it would be madness to reveal.’31 Writing to Warnie on 5 November 1939, Jack told him of Williams’s first experience of the club on 2 November:
I had a pleasant evening on Thursday with Williams, Tolkien, and Wrenn, during which Wrenn almost seriously expressed a strong wish to burn Williams, or at least maintained that conversation with Williams enabled him to understand how inquisitors had felt it right to burn people. Tolkien and I agreed afterwards that we just knew what he meant … The occasion was a discussion of the most distressing text in the Bible (‘narrow is the way and few they be that find it’)* and whether one really could believe in a universe where the majority were damned and also in the goodness of God. Wrenn, of course, took the view that it mattered precisely nothing whether it conformed to our ideas of goodness or not, and it was at that stage that the combustible possibilities of Williams revealed themselves to him in an attractive light. The general sense of the meeting was in favour of a view on the lines taken in Pastor Pastorum – that Our Lord’s replies are never straight answers and never gratify curiosity, and that whatever this one meant its purpose was certainly not statistical.32
He wrote to Warnie again on 11 November 1939 about an Inklings meeting on 9 November:
On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings – you and Coghill both absented unfortunately … I have never in my life seen Dyson so exuberant – ‘a roaring cataract of nonsense’. The bill of fare afterwards consisted of a section of the new Hobbit book from Tolkien, a nativity play from Williams* (unusually intelligible for him, and approved by all) and a chapter out of the book on The Problem of Pain from me. It so happened – it would take too long to explain why – that the subject matter produced a really first rate evening’s talk of the usual wide-ranging kind – ‘from grave to gay, from lively to severe’.33
Lewis read more of The Problem of Pain at other meetings of the Inklings. He remembered Charles Williams remarking that, while God had approved Job’s impatience, the ‘weight of divine displeasure had been reserved for the “comforters”, the self-appointed advocates on God’s side, the people who tried to show that all was well – “the sort of people”, he said, immeasurably dropping his lower jaw and fixing me with his eyes – “the sort of people who wrote books on the Problem of Pain”.’34 Lewis had meanwhile discussed the book with Dr Robert (‘Humphrey’) Havard,† who became his doctor in 1934. Jack came down with the flu that winter and Dr Havard remembered that, on visiting his new patient, ‘we spent some five minutes discussing his influenza, which was very straightforward, and then half an hour or more in a discussion of ethics and philosophy’.35 On 1 February 1940 Havard attended his first Inklings meeting and read a paper on his clinical experiences of the effects of pain, a portion of which Lewis afterwards used as an appendix to his book.
When The Problem of Pain was published in October 1940 it was dedicated to ‘The Inklings’. Lewis’s pupil Dom Bede Griffiths wanted to know who they were, and Lewis informed him in a letter of 26 December 1941: ‘Williams, Dyson of Reading, & my brother (Anglicans) and Tolkien and my doctor, Havard (your Church) are the “Inklings” to whom my Problem of Pain was dedicated.’36
It was not long after the publication of The Problem of Pain that the Inklings were rolling out of their seats as they listened to Lewis’s Screwtape Letters, which were being written during the autumn of 1940.
Other new members appeared during the war. Fr Gervase Mathew OP* was a member of the Catholic order of the Dominicans and lived at Blackfriars in St Giles. He lectured in the Modern History, Theology and English faculties of the University. Colin Hardie, the Dante and Virgil scholar, became Magdalen’s Fellow of Classics in 1936. He was at that time drawn towards the ‘progressive’ element in the college. However, as a result of a common interest in Dante – Lewis and Hardie were members of the Oxford Dante Society – they became friends and Hardie was invited to become an Inkling.
Other wartime recruits included James Dundas-Grant, who served in both wars, and in October 1944 became Commander of the Oxford University Naval Division.† The post entitled its holder to reside in Magdalen College, and after becoming friends with Lewis he was urged to join the club. Whereas Commander Dundas-Grant was almost fifty when he became a member of the Inklings, he was followed by the youngest members. John Wain, who was to achieve fame as a novelist and critic, matriculated at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1943. Due to the war, however, he was sent to Magdalen to be tutored in English, and Lewis was his tutor. Wain also ran into Lewis at meetings of the Socratic Club, and shortly after the end of the war Wain was invited to join the Inklings. This was its richest period, and in his autobiography, Sprightly Running (1962), he left one of the most engaging pictures of the Inklings during their great decade:
I can see that room so clearly now, the electric fire pumping heat into the dank air, the faded screen that broke some of the keener draughts, the enamel beer-jug on the table, the well-worn sofa and armchairs, and the men drifting in (those from distant colleges would be later), leaving overcoats and hats in any corner and coming over to warm their hands before finding a chair. There was no fixed etiquette, but the rudimentary honours would be done partly by Lewis and partly by his brother, W.H. Lewis, a man who stays in my memory as the most courteous I have ever met – not with mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetting considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing. Sometimes, when the less vital members of the circle were in a big majority, the evening would fall flat; but the best of them were as good as anything I shall live to see. This was the bleak period following a ruinous war, when every comfort (and some necessities) seemed to have vanished for ever; Lewis had American admirers who sent him parcels, and whenever one of these parcels had arrived the evening would begin with a distribution. His method was to scatter the tins and packets on his bed, cover them with the counterpane, and allow each of us to pick one of the unidentifiable humps; it was no use simply choosing the biggest, which might turn out to be prunes or something equally dreary. Another admirer used to send a succulent ham now and then; this, too, would be shared out. In winter we sat round the electric fire; in summer, often, on the steps at the back of the ‘New Building’, looking on to the deer-haunted grove.37
Another younger member was Christopher, the son of J.R.R. Tolkien. Christopher had known the Lewis brothers most of his life. He went up to Trinity College, Oxford in 1942 but left in 1944 to join the Royal Air Force. While he was overseas his father sent him chapters of The Lord of the Rings as it was being written. At the end of the war he returned to Trinity College and was invited to join the Inklings.
Before Christopher returned his father wrote to him about an outburst of energy vitally important to the development of ‘the new Hobbit’. By the beginning of 1944 The Lord of the Rings had been untouched for months, and Tolkien complained of lack of energy. Lewis urged him to go on, and at the beginning of April he resumed work. ‘I have embarked on an effort to finish my book,’ he said in his letter to Christopher of 5 April 1944. On 23 April he wrote excitedly to say: ‘I read my second chapter, Passage of the Dead Marshes, to Lewis and Williams on Wed. morning. It was approved. I have now nearly done a third.’38 He described an Inklings meeting held on 31 May as:
very enjoyable. Hugo was there: rather tired-looking, but reasonably noisy. The chief entertainment was provided by a chapter of Warnie Lewis’s book on the times of Louis XIV* (very good I thought it); and some excerpts from C.S.L.’s ‘Who Goes Home’ – a book on Hell, which I suggested should be called rather ‘Hugo’s Home’.† I did not get back till after midnight. The rest of my time, barring chores in and out doors, has been occupied by the desperate attempt to bring ‘The Ring’ to a suitable pause, the capture of Frodo by Orcs in the passes of Mordor … By sitting up all hours, I managed it: and read the last 2 chapters (Shelob’s Lair and The Choices of Master Samwise) to C.S.L. on Monday morning. He approved with unusual fervour, and was actually affected to tears by the last chapter, so it seems to be keeping up.39
It was about this time that Lewis’s American publishers, Macmillan of New York, begged him for some facts about himself they could put on the cover of their edition of Perelandra to be published on 11 April 1944. He responded with what was his only ‘biography’ until Surprised by Joy was published years later. It appeared on the covers of the Macmillan editions of Perelandra and That Hideous Strength for years, but it has been out of print for a very long time and we reproduce it here for the light it sheds on Lewis’s enjoyment of the ‘adult male laughter’ of the Inklings:
I never remember dates. The principal facts of my life are not (in a form suitable for biography) known to me. I was a younger son, and we lost my mother when I was a child. That meant very long days alone when my father was at work and my brother at boarding school. Alone in a big house full of books. I suppose that fixed a literary bent. I drew a lot, but soon began to write more. My first stories were mostly about mice (influence of Beatrix Potter), but mice usually in armor killing gigantic cats (influence of fairy stories). That is, I wrote the books I should have liked to read if only I could have got them. That’s always been my reason for writing. People won’t write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself: no rot about ‘self-expression’. I loathed school. Being an infantry soldier in the last war would have been nicer if one had known one was going to survive. I was wounded – by an English shell. (Hence the greetings of an aunt who said, with obvious relief, ‘Oh, so that’s why you were wounded in the back!’) I gave up Christianity at about fourteen. Came back to it when getting on for thirty. An almost purely philosophical conversion. I didn’t want to. I’m not the religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I’m my own master: but since the facts seemed to be the opposite I had to give in. My happiest hours are spent with three or four old friends in old clothes tramping together and putting up in small pubs – or else sitting up till the small hours in someone’s college rooms talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes. There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter.
The Inklings often welcomed guests, such as Jack’s ex-pupil, George Sayer, a master at Malvern College, later to write Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (1988). Another guest was the poet Roy Campbell (1902–57), who happened to be sitting in the inner room of the ‘Bird and Baby’ when the Inklings assembled there on 3 October 1944. As Tolkien wrote to Christopher,
I noticed a strange tall gaunt man half in khaki half in mufti with a large wide-awake hat, bright eyes and a hooked nose sitting in the corner. The others had their backs to him, but I could see in his eye that he was taking an interest in the conversation quite unlike the ordinary pained astonishment of the British (and American) public at the presence of the Lewises (and myself) in a pub … All of a sudden he butted in, in a strange unplaceable accent, taking up some point about Wordsworth. In a few seconds he was revealed as Roy Campbell (of Flowering Rifle and Flaming Terrapin). Tableau! Especially as C.S.L. had not long ago violently lampooned him in the Oxford Magazine … After that things became fast and furious and I was late for lunch. It was (perhaps) gratifying to find that this powerful poet and soldier desired in Oxford chiefly to see Lewis (and myself).40
Tolkien was referring to Lewis’s poem ‘To Roy Campbell’, which begins: ‘Dear Roy – Why should each wowzer on the list / Of those you damn be dubbed Romanticist?’41 But Lewis was probably more surprised than Tolkien to discover the identity of the mysterious stranger. Talking about it years later to Walter Hooper, he said what delighted him most about the man was that ‘He agreed with me totally about the failings in Campbell’s poetry, and in fact pointed out some I’d missed.’ After a good deal more of such criticism, Lewis asked who he was and was delighted to find it was Campbell himself. The poet was given a rapturous welcome when he later came to one of the Thursday evening meetings.
Perhaps the Tolkien letter that reveals most about Lewis’s love of ‘rational opposition’ is that about the meeting on 23 November 1944. Owen Barfield, always an especially strong stimulant to Lewis, was present. Tolkien wrote to Christopher,
C.S.L. was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: ‘Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: ‘That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’42
The Second World War ended on 9 May 1945. With the lights coming back on in the country, followed by a relaxation of many wartime restrictions, things looked hopeful to Lewis and his friends. Then, on 11 May, Charles Williams was seized with pain. He was rushed to the Radcliffe Infirmary and on 14 May he was operated on. Lewis learned he was there on Tuesday, 15 May, and while he was on his way to the Infirmary to take him some books, the Inklings gathered in the ‘Bird and Baby’ for their usual meeting. Lewis arrived at the Radcliffe to find that Williams had just died of an intestinal obstruction, an old problem for which he had been operated on in 1933. The shock was so great and so unexpected, said Lewis, that ‘when I joined them with my actual message – it was only a few minutes’ walk from the Infirmary but, I remember, the very streets looked different – I had some difficulty in making them believe or even understand what had happened. The world seemed to us at that moment primarily a strange one.’43
After the funeral, Charles Williams’s body was buried in the Cemetery of St Cross Church, which he attended during his years in Oxford, and it lies there beneath a white stone bearing an epitaph he had written for himself – ‘Under the Mercy’. Lewis expressed his feelings about him in a letter to a former pupil, Mrs Mary Neylan:
I also have become much acquainted with grief now through the death of my great friend Charles Williams, my friend of friends, the comforter of all our little set, the most angelic. The odd thing is that his death has made my faith ten times stronger than it was a week ago. And I find that all that talk about ‘feeling that he is closer to us than before’ isn’t just talk. It’s just what it does feel like – I can’t put it into words. One seems at moments to be living in a new world. Lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment.44
Although the effect of Williams’s death was very great, Lewis had exaggerated his impact on some of the other members. ‘I was and remain wholly unsympathetic to Williams’ mind’, Tolkien wrote to Dick Plotz on 12 September 1965. ‘I knew Charles Williams only as a friend of C.S.L. … We liked one another and enjoyed talking (mostly in jest) but we had nothing to say to one another at deeper (or higher) levels … But Lewis was a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship.’45 In the end Lewis’s introduction of Williams into the Inklings led to some cooling on Tolkien’s part.
Even so, there were some good Inkling years ahead. It is impossible to catch the flavour, or the multiplicity of subjects bandied and discussed so brilliantly; but Warnie Lewis’s diary, Brothers and Friends, preserves at least an echo of the later meetings when discussion had largely taken the place of mutual criticism. Writing about an Inklings meeting attended by Christopher Tolkien on 28 March 1946, Warnie said: ‘A good meeting of the Inklings, though scantily attended. Present, J and I, Christopher, Humphrey, Colin Hardie, Gervase Mathew. Interesting discussion on the possibility of dogs having souls.’46
It delighted Lewis that Anglican and Catholic Inklings got on so well together. The exception, curiously, was Hugo Dyson, a ‘high’ Anglican who wanted to limit the number of Catholics in their circle. J.A.W. Bennett,* a Catholic at Queen’s College, was helping Jack with his teaching in Magdalen and Tolkien invited him to the meeting on 15 August 1946. Warnie wrote that evening,
A small Inklings, only Ronald [Tolkien], Humphrey, ourselves, and J’s new lieutenant, brought in by Ronald from Queens, where he had been dining. I hear with dismay that Ronald has since talked of ‘bringing him in occasionally’: with dismay for two reasons, firstly that he is a dull dog, and secondly that he is an R.C. I don’t mind his being one in the least, but Hugo, who has puzzlingly strong views on the matter has several times lately threatened that if any more Papists join the Inklings he will resign.47
Jack Bennett became a member nevertheless, though he mainly attended the Tuesday meetings.
Sometimes the Inklings would meet at the King’s Arms pub, at the corner of Broad Street and Parks Road, instead of or in addition to the ‘Bird and Baby’. The choice of the King’s Arms was particularly convenient during the years when Lewis was working in the Bodleian on his volume for the Oxford History of English Literature (the OHEL – ‘the O Hell!’ as he called it). He would slip out to the King’s Arms about noon; and fledgling Inklings usually made their first appearance there. Green, for example, recorded in his diary on 26 September 1947, ‘Worked hard in Bodleian. Met C.S. Lewis there, who asked me out for a drink and talk at “The King’s Arms”; Christopher [Tolkien] joining us.’ These meetings usually took place during the Long Vacation and, it being summer, Lewis and his friends would settle themselves in the yard behind the pub for loud and merry discourse and argument. At the many gatherings which Green attended in 1948 and 1949 Hugo Dyson was usually there also, Professor Tolkien or his son Christopher frequently, Colin Hardie occasionally, and from time to time there was an additional visitor, usually someone whom Lewis had met by chance in the Bodleian.
‘At the Inklings,’ Warnie wrote on 24 October 1946 at the beginning of Michaelmas Term, ‘Tollers read us a couple of exquisite chapters from the “new Hobbit”. Nothing has come my way for a long time which has given me such enjoyment and excitement; as J says, it is more than good, it is great.’48
The next entry from Warnie’s diary requires some explanation. Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860–1939), known as ‘The World’s Worst Writer’, was a Belfast client of Albert Lewis, and through him Jack and Warnie discovered the lady’s appalling poems, Irene Iddlesleigh (1897) and Poems of Puncture (1915). It had become a customary feature of Inklings meetings to bet that no one could read a passage from either of these books with a straight face. On 28 November 1946 there was, Warnie wrote, ‘A pretty full meeting of the Inklings to meet Roy Campbell, now with the BBC, whom I was very glad to see again; he is fatter and tamer than he used to be I think. He read us nothing of his own, except translations of a couple of Spanish poems – none of us understood either of them. Wain won an outstanding bet by reading a chapter of Irene Iddlesleigh without a smile.’49
‘Inklings after dinner,’ wrote Warnie on 6 February 1947, ‘present ourselves, the Tolkiens, Colin, Wain, and Gervase. Colin read an interminable paper on an unintelligible point about Virgil: of which Wain remarked afterwards, “To say I didn’t understand it is a gross understatement”. Chris then gave us an admirable chapter of the “[new] Hobbit”, beautifully read.’50
While the others enjoyed the instalments of Tolkien’s brilliant ‘new Hobbit’ – The Lord of the Rings – Hugo Dyson didn’t hide the fact that he disliked it, and this caused Tolkien pain. ‘A well attended Inklings this evening,’ wrote Warnie on 24 April 1947, ‘both the Tolkiens, J and I, Humphrey, Gervase, Hugo; the latter came in just as we were starting on the “Hobbit”, and as he now exercises a veto on it – most unfairly I think – we had to stop.’51
On 27 September 1947 Warnie wrote:
Present Jack, Sayer, Colin Hardie, Christopher, Hugo and myself. Some enjoyable talk arising out of T.S. Eliot, one of whose poems Jack read superbly, but broke off in the middle declaring it to be bilge: Hugo defended it, Jack and Sayer attacked. I thought that though unintelligible, it did convey a feeling of frustration and despair. Jack thought it had nothing to say worth saying in any case. The conversation drifted to whether poets create or reflect the mood of their time.52
One of the lesser-known Inklings was C.E. ‘Tom Brown’ Stevens, Tutor in Ancient History at Magdalen.* He had known the Lewis brothers since he became a Fellow of Magdalen in 1933, but during nearly the whole of the war he served in the Foreign Office. In his diary Warnie provides the exact date of Stevens’s debut as an Inkling. Writing on the evening of 27 November 1947, he said:
A very pleasant meeting: Tollers, J, self, Stevens and Humphrey. We talked of Bishop Barnes,† of the extraordinary difficulty of interesting the uneducated indifferent in religion: savage and primitive man and the common confusion between them: how far pagan mythology was a substitute for theology: bravery and panache. Stevens said that Vauban’s‡ fortresses killed the old style panache: and told me a very interesting thing, viz., that our stand in the actual forts built by Vauban at Calais enabled the bulk of the B.E.F. [British Expeditionary Force] to escape through Dunkirk in 1940.53
‘A very pleasant little Inklings’, wrote Warnie on 22 January 1948. ‘Present Colin, Tom Stevens, Christopher, Jack and I. We drank wine and finished a noble “old style Kentucky brandied cake” which someone had sent J from America. Much talk of Mauritius, public schools and Sherlock Holmes stories.’54
The ‘old style Kentucky brandied cake’ was probably the gift of Dr Warfield M. Firor, Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.* He was one of the American friends who, as described by John Wain, sent Lewis innumerable food parcels during and after the war. Dr Firor, known to Lewis’s friends as ‘Firor-of-the-Hams’, made it possible for the Inklings to enjoy the occasional ham supper. One such meal was enjoyed on 11 March 1948, during which the various Inklings signed a statement thanking Dr Firor for his generosity and toasting his health. Lewis wrote to Dr Firor the next day:
The fate of the ham was this: we have a small informal literary club which meets in my rooms every Thursday for beer and talk, and – in happier times – for an occasional dinner. And last night, having your ham to dine off, we had a meal which eight members attended. By diligent ‘scraping the bottom of the barrel’ in various colleges we got two bottles of burgundy and two of port: the college kitchen supplied soup, fish and a savoury: and we had a delightful evening. This by English standards is a banquet rarely met with, and all agreed that they hadn’t eaten such a dinner for five years or more. I enclose a little souvenir of the occasion which may amuse you … yours Ham-icably, C.S. Lewis.
As some have not v. legible signatures, I had better say the list runs: C.S. Lewis, H.V. Dyson, Lord David Cecil, W.H. Lewis, C. Hardie, C.R. Tolkien, R.E. Havard, J.R.R. Tolkien. The order is just as we happened to be sitting. Tolkien père is the senior and T. fils the baby.
‘A pleasant Inklings,’ Warnie wrote on 18 March 1948, ‘attended by Humphrey, Tom Stevens, the Tolkiens, Colin, Hugo, J and I … Some good talk, largely philological, and about obscene words, arising out of my not understanding the meaning of “stool”* as used in a verse of the psalms we had at evensong in the cathedral.’55
Another Inkling who attended few of the Thursday evening meetings but many of those on Tuesday was R.B. McCallum,† Fellow and Tutor of History at Pembroke College. Writing about the meeting on 4 February 1949 Warnie said:
An enjoyable Inklings in the evening. Present, J, McCallum, Colin, Hugo and myself. Was glad to hear that Keir,‡ late of Univ., now of Queen’s Belfast, has been elected Master of Balliol … This set us talking of red brick universities from the job hunting point of view; from where the talk drifted, by channels which I have forgotten, to torture, Tertullian … the contractual theory in medieval kingship, odd surnames and place names. McCallum very good on kingship; he much improves as time goes on, and if one gets the impression in listening to him that you are having a tutorial, well I suppose a history don cannot very well talk history in any other way.56
The Inklings’ evenings in Magdalen grew fewer and on 27 October 1949 Warnie recorded in his diary: ‘No one turned up.’57 Eventually the Thursday evening meetings ceased altogether; but the Inkling meetings at the ‘B. and B.’ flourished exceedingly and continued until the last week of Lewis’s life. The ‘inner parlour’ was never booked for the occasion, nor shut to the public in any way; but the Inklings nearly always had it to themselves. The Tuesday meetings were changed to Monday after Lewis’s appointment to the Cambridge Chair in 1954, as it was his custom to return to his new university on that day, by the afternoon train, after spending the weekend at The Kilns. Only in 1962 when it was joined on to the main bar and the door removed did Lewis migrate regretfully across to the Lamb and Flag on the other side of St Giles Street – where a secluded corner at least was always obtainable.
There, in time, the most constant Inklings, besides Lewis himself, became R.B. McCallum, Colin Hardie, Humphrey Havard, Gervase Mathew, and Jim Dundas-Grant; but one might be just as likely to find Tolkien or Coghill, Lord David Cecil or W.H. Auden; or American scholars such as Chad Walsh in 1948 or Walter Hooper in 1963. Once again a few diary entries (this time Green’s) will give a pale reflection of these meetings:
13 February 1951. To ‘Eagle and Child’ to meet C.S.L.: a grand gathering – Tolkien, McCallum, Major Lewis, Wrenn, Hardie, Gervase Mathew, John Wain, and others whose names I didn’t catch. Discussion on C. Day Lewis (who was elected Professor of Poetry last week, beating C.S.L. by 19 votes): Lewis praised his Georgics but considered his critical work negligible.
9 November 1954. To ‘B. and B.’ to meet Lewis; his brother, McCallum, Tolkien, Gervase M. there as well. Very good talk, about Tolkien’s book,* horror comics, who is the most influential and important man in various countries: decided Burke for Ireland, Scott for Scotland, Shakespeare for England – but there difficulties arose, Pitt and Wellington also being put forward.
17 June 1963. To ‘Lamb and Flag’ about 12, there joined Jack. Several others – Gervase Mathew, Humphrey Havard, Colin Hardie, and a young American, Walter Hooper, who is writing some sort of book or thesis about Jack …
‘Only in retrospect’, wrote Chad Walsh, the American scholar who visited Lewis in Oxford during the summer of 1948, ‘did I realize how much intellectual ground was covered in these seemingly casual meetings. At the time the constant bustle of Lewis racing his friends to refill empty mugs or pausing to light another cigarette (occasionally a pipe) camouflaged the steady flow of ideas. The flow, I might add, is not a one-way traffic. Lewis is as good a listener as talker, and has alert curiosity about almost anything conceivable.’58
Following Lewis’s death a few of his friends, usually Humphrey Havard, Walter Hooper, R.B. McCallum, and James Dundas-Grant, tried to keep Monday meetings at the ‘Bird and Baby’ going. Increasingly there were excuses why one or more of them couldn’t be there. The epitaph was spoken by McCallum, who at a meeting in 1964 said to Hooper, ‘Let’s face it. Without Jack we can’t go on. When the sun goes out there’s no more light in the solar system.’
* Edmund Charles Blunden (1896–1974), poet, teacher, critic and biographer, was educated at The Queen’s College, Oxford, after which poetry and literary journalism claimed most of his time. However, he returned to Oxford and was a Fellow and Tutor of Merton College, 1931–45. He served with the UK liaison mission to Japan, 1947–50, and was Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong, 1953–63.
* Derek Stanley Brewer (1923– ) matriculated in 1941, but spent the next four years in the Army. He returned to Oxford in 1945 and took his BA from Magdalen in 1948. He was a lecturer in English at the University of Birmingham, 1949–56 and 1958–64, and a lecturer in English in the University of Cambridge, 1956–76. He was Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, 1977–90, and Professor of English in the University of Cambridge, 1983–90. A distinguished medievalist, Professor Brewer’s numerous books include Chaucer in his Time (1963), Chaucer and his World (1978) and A New Introduction to Chaucer (1998).
* On account of power-cuts decreed by the Labour administration.
* Kenneth Peacock Tynan (1927–80), pupil and theatre critic. He won a demyship to Magdalen College in 1945 and had Lewis as his tutor. Despite his aesthetic eccentricities, he and Lewis warmed to one another and were friends for the rest of their lives. On leaving Oxford Tynan made his mark as an actor, director and critic of the theatre. His works include Curtains (1961) and Tynan Right and Left (1967). See Kathleen Tynan, The Life of Kenneth Tynan (1988) and his biography in CG.
† John Wain CBE (1925–94), novelist, poet, and critic. He became a member of St John’s College, Oxford, in 1943 but was sent to Lewis for tuition in English. On taking a degree in 1947 he was a lecturer in English Literature at the University of Reading until 1955 when he left to devote himself to writing. His first novel, Hurry on Down (1955), was followed by others including The Contenders (1958) and A Winter in the Hills (1970). His Sprightly Running: Part of an Autobiography (1962) includes an account of his tutorials and meetings of the Inklings. See his biography in CG.
* Gordon Bottomley (1874–1948), poet and dramatist, who was obliged by ill health to live in seclusion. His works include Poems in Thirty Years (1925) and the verse play King Lear’s Wife (1915).
* Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868–1944) was the great-grandson of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He became a Fellow of Magdalen College in 1893 and taught classics until his retirement in 1925. Lewis’s reminiscences of Mr Benecke are found in Margaret Denecke’s Paul Victor Mendelssohn Benecke (1868–1944) [1954], pp. 31–4.
* Clement Charles Julian Webb (1865–1954), theologian and philosopher, was Tutor in Philosophy at Magdalen College, 1889–1922, and Oriel Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion and Fellow of Oriel College, Oxford, 1922–30.
† John Alexander Smith (1863–1939), philosopher and classicist, was Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy and Fellow of Magdalen College, 1910–36.
‡ Frank Edward Brightman (1856–1932), liturgist of the Church of England, was one of the original librarians of Pusey House, Oxford. He was a Fellow of Magdalen College, 1902–32. Among his publications is the monumental work, The English Rite (1915).
§ Colin Hardie (1906–98) took a First in Literae Humaniores from Balliol College in 1928 and in 1933 became the Director of the British School at Rome. He returned to Oxford in 1936 as Fellow and Classical Tutor at Magdalen College. In 1940 he married Christian Lucas and they had two sons, Nicholas (to whom The Silver Chair is dedicated) and Anthony. Besides his work on Virgil and Dante, Hardie was Public Orator for the University of Oxford, 1967–73. See his biography in CG.
* Arthur Lee Dixon (1867–1955) was a Fellow of Merton College, 1891–1922, and Fellow of Magdalen and Waynflete Professor of Pure Mathematics, 1922–45. In a portrait of him found in AMR, Lewis said of Dixon: ‘A man to be depended on to the end: he is at peace, like the animals, but with the added charm of reason: a good man, a good (almost a great) gentleman, but no more spiritual than the worst degenerate in whom – for everything else – one would find his opposite. If he had physical beauty he would be the Pagan ideal of the “good man” perfectly realized.’
† Adam Fox (1883–1977) took his BA from University College, Oxford, in 1906. Following his ordination he taught at Lancing College after which he was Warden of Radley College. He returned to Oxford in 1929 as Fellow and Dean of Magdalen College where he remained until 1942. He published a long narrative poem, Old King Cole, in 1937 and the following year he was elected, with a good deal of help from Lewis, Oxford’s Professor of Poetry. See his biography in CG.
* Ruth Pitter CBE (1898–1992), poet, was born in Ilford, Essex. She was converted to Christianity through hearing Lewis’s Mere Christianity broadcasts during the Second World War. Her many volumes of poetry include First Poems (1920), A Mad Woman’s Garland (1935), A Trophy of Arms (1936), Pitter on Cats (1947) and Poems 1926–66 (1968). In 1946 she wrote to Lewis asking if they might meet. He was already an admirer of her poems, and they became close friends. In his biography, Jack: C.S. Lewis and his Times (1988), George Sayer said that following a visit to Miss Pitter in 1955 Lewis told him that ‘if he were not a confirmed bachelor, Ruth Pitter would be the woman he would like to marry’ (ch. 19, p. 211).
* Sir Laurence Whistler (1912–2000), glass-engraver, writer and poet. After taking a degree from Balliol College, Oxford, he published Sir John Vanbrugh, Architect and Dramatist (1938). Meanwhile, his artistic interests grew to include glass-engraving and in this he discovered his true vocation. His correspondence with Lewis is in the Bodleian Library.
† Andrew Young (1885–1971), poet, whose work was much admired by Lewis. His books include Collected Poems (1936), The Green Man (1947), and Out of the World and Back (1958).
* Edward Tangye Lean (1911–74), brother of film director David Lean, matriculated at University College in 1929 where he read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. During his three years at Univ. Lean published two novels, Of Unsound Mind (1932) and Storm in Oxford (1933), and served as the editor of the student magazine, Isis. After leaving Oxford he worked for the German Service of the BBC. His Voices in the Darkness (1943) is an account of the task of the BBC’s wartime broadcasts. He later worked as an administrator of the BBC.
* Lord David Cecil (1902–86), second son of the fourth Marquess of Salisbury, was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. After taking a First in History in 1924 he taught Modern History and English Literature at Wadham College, 1924–30. In 1930 he left Oxford to pursue literary work in London. He married in 1932, and in 1939 he returned to Oxford as Fellow of English at New College, a position he held until he became Goldsmith’s Professor of English Literature in 1949. His writings include a biography of William Cowper, The Stricken Deer (1929) as well as biographies of Lord Melbourne and Jane Austen. See his biography in CG.
* Charles Leslie Wrenn (1895–1969) took his BA from Queen’s College, Oxford, after which he lectured in English at Durham University, 1917–20. He was afterwards Principal and Professor of English at Pachaiyappa’s College, Madras, 1920–1; and Head of the Department of English at the University of Dacca, 1921–7. He returned to England in 1928 to become Lecturer in English at Leeds University where he remained until he came to Oxford in 1930 to assist Professor Tolkien with the teaching of Anglo-Saxon. He was Professor of English at the University of London, 1939–46. See his biography in CG.
* Matthew 7:14: ‘Strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.’
* The House by the Stable, included in Seed of Adam and Other Plays, ed. Anne Ridler (1948).
† Dr Robert Emlyn Havard (1901–85) matriculated at Keble College in 1919 and took a First in Chemistry in 1921. He became a Catholic shortly afterwards, and because of Keble’s ban on Catholics was forced to move to Queen’s College. On receiving his BM, he practised at London Hospital and the Radcliffe Infirmary, Oxford. He taught in the Biochemistry Department of Leeds University for several years, but in 1934 he returned to Oxford to take over a medical practice in Headington and St Giles. Lewis gave him the name ‘Humphrey’ after the doctor in Perelandra. Havard was married with five children, and besides being a busy husband and father, he was one of the most energetic of the Inklings and a member of the Socratic Club.
* Father Anthony Gervase Mathew OP (1905–76) was born in Chelsea and was educated at Balliol College where he read Modern History. He joined the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) in 1928 and took the name ‘Gervase’. Blackfriars, Oxford, was his home for the rest of his life. He was ordained a priest in 1934. That same year he and his brother, David Mathew (1902–75), Archbishop of Apamea in Bithynia, published The Reformation and the Contemplative Life (1934). He became a lecturer in the schools of Modern History, Theology and English Literature, and in 1947 he was appointed University Lecturer in Byzantine Studies. His books include Byzantine Aesthetics (1963) and The Court of Richard II (1968).
† James Dundas-Grant (1896–1985) was born in London and educated at Eton College. He entered the Navy at the beginning of the First World War and later volunteered for the Air Branch. He became a major and served in Italy and France. After the war he became a Lloyd’s underwriter, and a member of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. He began his appointment as Commander of the Oxford University Naval Division after being recalled to service in 1944. He was a devout Catholic and he and his wife Katherine did much to help the Catholic youth of Oxford. See his biography in CG.
* W.H. Lewis, The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV (1953).
† The Great Divorce: A Dream (1946).
* Jack Arthur Walter Bennett (1911–81), a distinguished medievalist, was born in Auckland, New Zealand, and matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, in 1933. He took his BA in 1935 and his D.Phil. in 1938. That same year he was elected to a junior research fellowship at Queen’s College. During the war he served with the US Research Department. He returned to Queen’s in 1945, and in 1947 he was elected to a fellowship at Magdalen. In 1964 Bennett succeeded Lewis as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English in Cambridge. Among his many writings is his inaugural lecture in Cambridge, The Humane Medievalist (1965) in which he pays tribute to Lewis. See his biography in CG.
* Courtenay Edward ‘Tom Brown’ Stevens (1905–76), a distinguished ancient historian, was educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford. He took a First in Literae Humaniores in 1928, and published his B.Litt. thesis as Sidonius Apollinaris and his Age (1933). Stevens was elected a Fellow of Magdalen in 1933, but left in 1940 to work in the Foreign Office. During the war he worked as an intelligence officer with Radio Atlantic. He was Fellow and Tutor in Ancient History at Magdalen, 1946–72. Besides being a great Oxford character, he was one of the best tutors in the University.
† Ernest William Barnes (1874–1953), Bishop of Birmingham, 1924–53, who in his Rise of Christianity (1947) scandalized orthodox Christians by his denial of miracles.
‡ The Marquis Sébastien Le Prestre de Vauban (1633–1707) was a French military engineer who revolutionized fortification strategies during the reign of Louis XIV.
* Dr Warfield M. Firor (1896–1988) was born in Baltimore. He received his BA in 1917 from the Johns Hopkins University and his MD in 1921 from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He remained at Johns Hopkins for residencies in both neurosurgery and surgery and became a faculty member and surgeon at Johns Hopkins. He played a major role in the effort to raise the level of training in surgery throughout the United States. He conducted research on the effects of tetanus toxin on the spinal cord and investigated the treatment of diseased adrenal glands with hormone implants. Among his surgical contributions was the introduction of intestinal antisepsis in preparation for colon surgery. There is a collection of his papers and interviews in the Alan Mason Chesney Medical Archives at Johns Hopkins. The originals of his letters from Lewis are in the Bodleian Library.
* Psalm 94:20: ‘Wilt thou have any thing to do against the stool of wickedness: which imagineth mischief as a law.’
† Ronald Buchanan McCallum (1898–1973) matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1919 and read Modern History. He was elected Fellow and Tutor of History at Pembroke College in 1925. He took great interest in The Oxford Magazine. After holding a number of positions in the college, he was elected Master of Pembroke in 1955. He retired in 1967 to become principal of St Catharine’s, Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Great Park, a position he held until 1971.
‡ Sir David Keir (1895–1973), first mentioned on page 74, was President and Vice-Chancellor of the Queen’s University, Belfast, 1939–49.
* The Lord of the Rings.
1 Rudyard Kipling, ‘If –’ (1910), 5–6.
2 Derek Brewer’s reminiscences were given in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green.
3 Lawlor, C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections, p. 6.
4 Ibid., pp. 7–8.
5 SBJ, ch. 9, p. 105.
6 Ibid., ch. 14, p. 168.
7 FL, pp. 767–8.
8 Adam Fox, ‘At the Breakfast Table’, in C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences, ed. James T. Como (1979; 2nd edn, 1992), pp. 92–3.
9 Ibid., pp. 93–4.
10 Ibid., p. 92.
11 C.S. Lewis, Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939), p. 85.
12 Ibid., p. 82.
13 Ibid., p. 83.
14 Helen Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. LI, pp. 422–3. Reprinted in Critical Thought Series I, Critical Essays on C.S. Lewis, ed. George Watson (1992).
15 Rehabilitations and Other Essays, pp. 92–3.
16 Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, p. 423.
17 Coghill, ‘The Approach to English’, p. 55.
18 FL, letter of 17 June 1918, pp. 381, 382.
19 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 861, fol. 35.
20 In Selected Literary Essays, ed Walter Hooper (1969).
21 Whistler’s account of the second meeting on 9 May 1947. Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 862.
22 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 862, fol. 5.
23 Ibid., fol. 8.
24 Ibid., fol. 6.
25 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Humphrey Carpenter (1981), letter to William Luther White of 11 September 1967, p. 388.
26 Ibid.
27 The Oxford Magazine, LII, No. 5 (9 November 1933).
28 TST, p. 449.
29 Published in The Lost Road and Other Writings, ed. Christopher Tolkien (1987).
30 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 29.
31 Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C.S. Lewis (1947), pp. viii–ix.
32 Letters, pp. 326–7.
33 Ibid., p. 328.
34 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. xiii.
35 Robert E. Havard, ‘Philia: Jack at Ease’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 216.
36 Letters, p. 363.
37 Wain, Sprightly Running, ch. 5, p. 184.
38 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 73.
39 Ibid., p. 83.
40 Ibid., p. 95.
41 Collected Poems, p. 80.
42 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 103.
43 Essays Presented to Charles Williams, p. xiv.
44 Letters, pp. 377–8.
45 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp. 361–2.
46 BF, p. 188.
47 Ibid., p. 193.
48 Ibid., pp. 196–7.
49 Ibid., p. 197.
50 Ibid., p. 198.
51 Ibid., p. 200.
52 Ibid., p. 209.
53 Ibid., p. 216.
54 Ibid., p. 217.
55 Ibid., p. 219.
56 Ibid., p. 225.
57 Ibid., p. 230.
58 Walsh, C.S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, pp. 16–17.