The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (14 page)

Altogether more wholesome was the unexpected discovery of conscience. As is the case with many adolescents, Lewis’s increased command over the things of the world brought with it a corresponding atrophy of the moral sense. He lived for his own pleasure, which took the form of intellectual pursuits and a few close friendships. He believed in being kind to companions, even lending them money if called for; for the rest of it, morality was no more than a fascinating mental study; reading Latin or Greek classics on ethical matters was all well and good, even bracing, but it had nothing to do with one’s own behavior. Then came a flurry of events that turned his values upside down. The first, by Lewis’s own reckoning, was the discovery of George MacDonald, whose fiction had earlier deepened Tolkien’s understanding of fantasy motifs.

The great breakthrough came on March 4, 1916, when Lewis purchased, from a train bookstall in Leatherhead, through what amounted (as he saw it in retrospect) to “a superabundance of mercy,” a worn Everyman’s copy of MacDonald’s 1858 novel,
Phantastes
. This picaresque tale of the adventures of Anodos (a Platonic term for the ascent to truth) in Fairyland, offers a slew of fantastic characters, including a fairy grandmother, a knight in armor, tree spirits, and a malevolent presence that is the hero’s own shadow, along with an atmosphere that Lewis describes in
Surprised by Joy
as a “bright shadow,” “something too near to see, too plain to be understood,” something that “seemed to have been always with me.” Lewis defines this mysterious something that
Phantastes
possesses as “Holiness” (the capital letter is his).

At least in Lewis’s case, the holiness of
Phantastes
was not confined to the book; when he closed its covers, rather than finding ordinary things dull by comparison, he discovered that its enchantment had spilled into the real world, “transforming all common things.” Lewis’s imagination, he tells us, was forevermore “baptized.” What this means is not precisely clear: at most, it suggests that Lewis believed his imagination was in some way marked by supernatural grace; at least, it means that he glimpsed the possibility of goodness and purity in the everyday world, that Joy was no longer confused with magic, eroticism, or power but was something that he could seek among ordinary people and things. In either case, it meant that his imagination—both his way of perceiving reality and his artistic accounting of that reality—became a means of self-transformation, self-purification, possibly even salvation. After reading
Phantastes
, Lewis became more open to traditional moral influences, although he still believed in absolute autonomy and was capable of behaving—at least in his relations with his father—with little regard for the feelings of others.

Another stage in Lewis’s moral ascent arrived a year and a half later—in November 1917, on the verge of heading to the front—and again via a book. This time it was Arthur Clutton-Brock’s
The Ultimate Belief
, a slim volume that had a tremendous circulation during the war. In it, Clutton-Brock celebrates lovers, saints, scientists, and artists—a motley crew, one would think—for their common allegiance to the “human spirit,” which inspires mystery and awe and which manifests itself, above all, through beauty, be it the beauty of holiness, of cosmic order, or of romance. Beauty is its own reward, for it not only expresses but magnifies the spirit. This may be true, but is rather insipid; as T. S. Eliot observed of Clutton-Brock’s work, “its thought is not daring, but its commonsense is sound.”

Lewis, however, was thunderstruck. Before reading Clutton-Brock, he had seen but two ways of understanding morality: as either “god-imposed laws” (and he did not believe in God) or “rules for convenience” with no higher authority. Clutton-Brock offered a third alternative, that morality was a mode of art, “an object to be pursued for its own beauty.” Art, Lewis already held dear to his heart, as a portal to Joy; now it appeared that art was, in some mysterious way, allied to morality as well. It seemed as if Clutton-Brock had sought his own form of Joy. Curiously, Sir William Rothenstein’s portrait of Clutton-Brock in the National Gallery shows a face uncannily like Lewis’s—longer, more ascetical, but with the same clean-shaven, forthright, pleasantly pugilistic expression. Nor does the resemblance end there; a glance at
The Ultimate Belief
or any of Clutton-Brock’s works, with their sturdy, simple titles—
Essays on Art
,
Essays on Books
,
Essays on Religion
,
What Is the Kingdom of Heaven?
—brings to mind the popular philosophical and religious books Lewis would produce after his conversion. This is how the first chapter of
The Ultimate Belief
begins:

Most people in England think of a philosopher as one who talks in a difficult language about matters which are of interest only to philosophers. But Philosophy is concerned with what must interest every human being, with the nature of man and the nature of the universe. Every man is born a philosopher, but often the philosopher is suppressed in him by the hand-to-mouth thinking needed for the struggle for life. So boys are often more philosophical than men, pupils than their teachers; and what they miss in their lessons, without knowing it, is philosophy.

In its relaxed, down-to-earth tone, one chap talking to another without pretense or fuss; in its appeal to common sense and ordinary life; in its short, declarative sentences, with their simple syntax and rolling rhythms, this is pure Lewis, or at least a very close relation. Above all, this is the Lewis of the World War II BBC Radio talks and of
Mere Christianity
. The voice is radically different from that of Morris or MacDonald or Chesterton; it sounds far more like the mature Lewis than do any of his other early literary enthusiasms. Did Lewis consciously adopt Clutton-Brock’s prose as a model for his own? He never acknowledged this, but he did read
The Ultimate Belief
at the age of nineteen, when the wet clay of a young person’s literary style is ready to be molded and fired.

Other books read during this time also shaped his future thought. While in the hospital recovering from trench fever, he read a collection of Chesterton’s ebullient apologetic essays (Chesterton was an Anglican during the war years, though edging ever closer to the Catholic Church); Lewis admired his brilliance, his humor, and his essential goodness, and listened with pleasure, if not approbation, to his arguments for faith. He had been aware of Chesterton for many years, as one of the literary celebrities always referred to by their initials (G.K.C.) by the highbrows at school, and whom Lewis had lumped together with other contemporary writers who were all the rage at Oxford (“I have often sat in amazed silence amid glib talk of Rupert Brooke, Masefield, Chesterton, Bottomley, etc”). However, he was not prepared for and had no ready defense against the “immediate conquest” made of him, so soon after encountering MacDonald, by the mirthful earnestness and scintillating paradoxes of this second Christian author. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading” would be his tongue-in-cheek assessment in
Surprised by Joy.
The force of his remark is lessened by the gratingly coy remark that follows—“God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous”—but the point remains that MacDonald and Chesterton proved so enchanting, so bracingly convincing to this young atheist that, as Chesterton said of Samuel Johnson, and as Maisie Ward in turn said of Chesterton, they managed to “walk into the heart without knocking.” But though they did take up residence in Lewis’s heart, his head remained for the time unconverted.

He was turned, rather than converted, by another creed encountered during convalescence, that of Henri Bergson, whose elegantly expressed philosophy, affirming that the moral subject transcends space and time and therefore is genuinely free, defending immediate intuition as a valid mode of knowledge, and celebrating the life force (
é
lan vital)
, Lewis found profoundly exhilarating. From Bergson he learned “to relish energy, fertility, and urgency; the resource, the triumphs and even the insolence, of things that grow.” The best thing was that one could be a Bergsonian without making any irrevocable religious decisions. With Bergson’s help, Lewis fashioned what he would later call his “New Look,” neither pessimist nor optimist, neither materialist nor spiritualist. He resolved, like Margaret Fuller, to accept the universe—without a Carlyle to retort, “Gad, he’d better.” His decision amounted to more than a lull in the search, however; the universe still had business to discuss with him.

Was Lewis, then, no longer a materialist by 1919? This is not a simple question. Pure materialism, of the reductive or eliminative kind, the doctrine that matter accounts for all that exists including our mental life, that we are nothing but specks of dust in a cold, purposeless cosmos, is far rarer in the history of thought than many realize, though one finds such rhetoric in the writings of popular controversialists like Joseph McCabe (1867–1955), a Franciscan priest turned antireligious crusader to whom Chesterton devoted a teasing chapter in his 1908 book
Heretics
. By Lewis’s time, however, this soapbox materialism was already fading. After peaking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it now lived on past glories, with most materialists flirting with the
é
lan vital
or similar modifications, content to exempt their own free choices from the determinist implications of their creed. The great mathematical logician and passionate agnostic Bertrand Russell, whose “A Free Man’s Worship” (1903) celebrated Stoical virtue in a universe of blind chance (“Brief and powerless is man’s life. On him and all his race the slow doom falls pitiless and dark…”), was now at work on a philosophical system, “neutral monism,” that would enable one to be a materialist and a mystic at the same time; and to many, the findings of modern physics were making the old materialism look dogmatic and out of date, though it would be periodically revived (witness, in the early twenty-first century, the writings of Richard Dawkins).

It remained for Lewis to sort out the entangled strands of materialism and spiritualism, Romanticism and realism in his own worldview. He was barely out of his teens, after all, and had yet to tackle the peculiar form of idealism, expounded by T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Bernard Bosanquet, that, though in decline, still had its staunch defenders at Oxford; nor had he mastered the philosophical realism that was vigorously overtaking it. Under the circumstances, Lewis was wise to carry his intellectual schemas lightly and withhold decision until he could see things more clearly.

Return to Oxford

By January 1919, Lewis was back at Oxford, elated that “the Junior Common Room is no longer swathed in dust sheets” and enjoying meals in the great hall with a skeleton crew of twenty-seven fellow University College students. In April he moved into new rooms, which soon reflected the studied ordinariness he had admired in Clutton-Brock’s prose: the walls a drab grayish-blue adorned with D
ü
rer prints and a single piece of good furniture—predictably, a bookcase. Writing to Arthur, he singled out for praise the ceiling beam, the deep windows, and the old tree outside, all of which reminded him of
Phantastes
and
Wuthering Heights
, and expressed regret (perhaps out of politeness) at having left behind the pictures Arthur had given him. To live in reasonable comfort with one’s “household gods” close by was enough for Lewis; not for him the aestheticism of Tolkien’s Exeter College rooms, with their Japanese prints and fine furniture. For Lewis this was a conscious and enduring choice; he wore baggy flannels until his death and, once converted, espoused a “mere Christianity” as gloriously ordinary as his imagination could devise.

Like Tolkien, though, Lewis plunged into the extracurricular debate and lecture scene, honing the dialectic skills that would bring him both happiness and misery in later years. He joined the Martlets, a University College literary society and in some ways a prototype—albeit in formal dress—of the Inklings, with organized lectures (four per term), a membership limited to twelve, and regular minutes. Lewis read papers to the Martlets on Spenser, Morris, Boswell, and other favorite authors, and first formulated in a public forum his ideas on literary criticism and on the nature of stories. Writing to his father, he reported that he had been elected secretary of the Martlets and that in consequence, even if history forgot him, his handwriting would remain for posterity—a sarcastic aside that simultaneously veils and reveals his youthful hunger for fame.

January 1919 brought Mrs. Moore and her daughter, Maureen, to rented lodgings in Oxford, in order to be close to him. In letters to Albert and Warnie, Lewis pretended that the Moores were still in Bristol, but for Arthur he painted a different picture: “After breakfast I work (in the library or a lecture-room which are both warm) or attend lectures until 1 o’clock when I bycycle out to Mrs. Moore’s. They are installed in our ‘own hired house’ (like St Paul only not daily preaching and teaching). The owner of the house has not yet cleared out & we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room.” Note the “we”; evidently Lewis’s peculiar relationship with Mrs. Moore—whom he now called “Minto” after Nuttall’s Mintoes, a popular sweet compounded of treacle, butter, sugar, and mint flavoring—had thickened. From then on, Lewis would shuttle between academic and domestic worlds; there would be no hope of an ivory tower existence nor of a serene home life (in a July 4, 1923, diary entry, Lewis recalls nine different lodgings shared with Mrs. Moore beginning in 1919—“most of them vile”). Yet from the complications and strain in his life would come many of Lewis’s best insights into the psychology of virtue and vice. By May 1919, Albert was seriously worried by what he termed “Jack’s affair” (he recognized the likelihood of a sexual element), disturbed by Mrs. Moore’s age, marital status, and lack of money. “She is old enough to be his mother,” he wrote to Warnie, suggesting, perhaps, a fear that she was replacing both mother and father in Jack’s affections. In June, Warnie wrote back to say, “I am greatly relieved … to hear that Mrs Moore HAS a husband: I understood she was a widow; but as there is a Mr Moore, the whole complexion of the business is altered. We now get the following very unsatisfactory findings. (1) Mrs Moore can’t marry Jacks. (2) Mr Moore can’t blackmail him because ‘IT’ hasn’t enough to make it a paying risk. (3) You can’t be blackmailed because you wouldn’t listen to the proposition for one moment.”