The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (15 page)

Lewis tried raising the matter of Mrs. Moore with his brother but was harshly cut off, for Warnie, like Albert, felt somewhat elbowed aside in his brother’s affections. “The daily letter business
does
annoy me,” Warnie told their father, “especially as I have heard from Jacks
once
since January of this year.” It became increasingly clear to both brother and father that for Lewis, whatever the nature of her hold might be, Mrs. Moore came first.

The summer of 1919 brought visits to Lewis in Oxford from Arthur and Warnie; the two brothers then paid a sentimental call on the Kirkpatricks at Great Bookham, followed by a belated, obligatory, and thoroughly disastrous stay with their father in Ireland. Lewis had delayed the return to Little Lea as long as he could, claiming that he still had work to do after the end of term. Albert had been depressed, drinking heavily, and suffering excruciating pains from an undisclosed ailment; as a result, he was “fast becoming unbearable,” Lewis told Warnie. Political tensions in Ireland—which did not interest Lewis—were spreading gloom among its citizens as well. The appalling postscript with which he ended a June letter to Arthur—“Haven’t heard from my esteemed parent for some time; has he committed suicide yet?”—may not have been far off the mark.

When the brothers finally arrived in Little Lea, an explosion seemed inevitable. A bit of snooping on Albert’s part revealed that Lewis had lied about the state of his finances, claiming to be five pounds in the black when he was twelve pounds overdrawn (the difference having gone to help support Mrs. Moore and her daughter); when the truth came out, so did all of Lewis’s stored-up resentments, and he unleashed against his father a litany of ancient grievances. Albert poured out his grief in his diary: “On 6 August he deceived me and said terrible, insulting, and despising things to me. God help me! That all my love and devotion and self-sacrifice should have come to this—that ‘he doesn’t respect me. That he doesn’t trust me, and cares for me in a way’ … The loss of Jacks’ affection, if it be permanent, is irreparable and leaves me very miserable and heart sore.” It was, for Lewis, a considerable relief to return in August to Oxford and help the Moores move house once again. He wrote to his father, although less frequently than before, attempting to justify his harsh words in the name of sincerity and to reduce their painful effects by means of chattiness and expedient deceptions; he signed his letters, as always, “your loving son, Jack.” In retrospect, he would call this period “the blackest chapter of my life.”

In November 1919, Lewis forged a friendship that further challenged his skepticism—and one that has proved invaluable for those who seek to understand him, for many decades later this friend provided, in a retrospective essay, our earliest glimpse of Lewis by someone outside the family circle. Leo Kingsley Baker (1898–1986) was in some ways Lewis’s double: both were twenty-one, veterans wounded on the French battlefield, Oxford scholars, and aspiring poets; Baker, however, would enjoy a very different destiny, working as an actor, a weaver, and an Anthroposophical priest before winding up as a teacher at a drama college in South East London. Baker learned of Lewis from another University College student, Rodney Marshall Sabine Pasley, who spoke of “a strange fellow who seemed to live an almost secret life and took no part in the social life of the college”—an understandable impression, since Lewis was spending much of his free time with Mrs. Moore—and yet who was, as a scholar and poet, “right up our tree.”

After an introduction in Pasley’s rooms, Baker and Lewis began exchanging poems and taking long afternoon walks together. Lewis wrote Arthur that his new friend was the product of a progressive school “where everyone seems to have written, painted and composed” and that he had a propensity for the spiritual and the outr
é
: “He is so clairvoyant that in childhood ‘he was afraid to look round the room for fear of what he might see.’ He got a decoration in France for doing some work in an aeroplane over the lines under very deadly fire: but he maintains that he did nothing, for he was ‘out of his body’ and could see his own machine with ‘someone’ in it, ‘roaring with laughter.’” On the whole, Lewis said, “I like and admire him very much, though at times I have doubts on his sanity.”

Lewis was fascinated by, yet distrusted, Baker’s spiritual side. Tongue in cheek, he offered to be Baker’s “amateur disciple in mysticism,” but received a fright on one occasion when he looked into Baker’s eyes: “presently I could hardly see anything else: and everything he said was real—incredibly real. When I came away, I moved my eyes off his, with a jerk, so to speak, and suddenly found that I had a splitting headache and was tired and nervous and pulled to pieces. I fancy I was a bit hypnotised. At any rate I had such a fit of superstitious terror as I have never known since childhood and have consequently conceived, for the present, a violent distaste for mysteries and all that kind of business.” A few months later, however, he was describing Baker, in a May 1920 letter to Arthur, as “in every way the best person I have met in Oxford.” The friends talked incessantly about their literary enthusiasms and hatreds (a resounding yea to
The Mabinogion
and
The Crock of Gold
, nay to free verse and the Sitwells), and analyzed the nature of inspiration. They joined forces with Pasley to produce an anthology whose title, “The Way’s the Way,” came from
The Pilgrim’s Progess
, as a “counterblast” to the “Vorticist” poetry—vers libre in form, modernist in philosophy, world-weary in spirit—that was all the rage. Eventually, Lewis drew close enough to Baker to introduce him to Mrs. Moore and invite him to her house.

Yet always Baker sensed a deeply rooted impediment to a deeper or freer friendship. That obstacle, according to Baker, was Lewis himself. He found Lewis’s prejudices odd and his sympathies constrained: “I was interested in contemporary events, social conditions, the arts, marriage, and even politics. Lewis was not. He crossed them all out, except insofar as they bumped into him.” To Baker, Lewis was a caged beast, a dogmatic rationalist who “lived in an enclosed world with rigid walls built by his logic and intelligence, and trespassers would be prosecuted. Within these walls were his ambition and single-minded determination to get the highest class in the examinations, which in his case meant the classics and philosophy…”

Like a caged beast, Lewis liked to pace and he liked to roar, astonishing Baker—who had never met a self-proclaimed atheist—by one day shouting over tea, “You take too many things for granted. You can’t start with God.
I don’t accept God!
” Had Lewis been more settled in his atheism, he might have been calmer in his denunciation; but he was already coming to suspect, as he told Baker in September 1920, that “some sort of God” (presumably an H. G. Wells or Clutton-Brock sort of God) had to be postulated; merely postulated, that is, not submitted to in faith. “Were you much frightened in France?” Baker asked Lewis. “All the time, but I never sank so low as to pray.”

Shouting over tea was the least of Lewis’s flare-ups. Once, Baker tells us, Lewis lashed out at him for no apparent reason “with deep and uncontrollable hatred.” A second explosion, coming via letter, led to an estrangement that lasted until 1935, when Lewis, informed that Baker was seriously ill, wrote to him “to try and pick up some of the old links. That they were ever dropped was, I imagine, chiefly my fault—at least even self-love on my part cannot find any substantial respect in which it could have been yours. Will you forgive me?”

Baker ascribes Lewis’s black moods to the three great trials of his early years: the death of his mother, the troubled relationship with his father, and the miserable years at school; the result, in Baker’s view, was a young man who rarely laughed, who worshipped only mind, and who encased his heart in lead. This seems too one-sided; Baker profoundly unsettled Lewis, and as conversation strayed into the mystical regions that alarmed him so, Lewis behaved his worst. Still, Lewis was surely unhappy. At times he exuded an aura of deeply settled sorrow, nowhere more evident than in his first book, the lyric cycle begun in 1917 and published in 1919 under a title that again recalls the caged beast:
Spirits in Bondage.

Lewis’s original title, actually, was
Spirits in Prison
, alluding to the belief (based on 1 Peter 3:18–20) that Christ preached the Gospel to the spirits in Hades. He changed it after his father pointed out its similarity to the title of a 1908 novel, Robert Hichens’s
A Spirit in Prison
. The title also nearly duplicates
The Spirits in Prison
, an 1884 book on the Harrowing of Hell by the celebrated dean of Wells Cathedral and former University College scholar, Edward Hayes Plumptre. We don’t know if Lewis read this work by one of his college’s alumni, but in any event, he had a more radical project in mind, for
Spirits in Bondage
inverts the Gospel story: in Lewis’s telling, the spirits have been imprisoned by an oppressive God, and it is the Romantic rebel-poet, Lewis himself, an inspired adversary rather than a dutiful only-begotten son, who sings of their release.

Spirits in Bondage

We forgive Tolkien his “Goblin Feet,” for in its whimsical conceits and singsong rhymes we discern the outlines of later, far greater work. Lewis’s early publications deserve the same indulgence. Walter Hooper, who served as Lewis’s secretary during the final months of his life and then as literary executor, editor, and custodian of Lewis’s entire intellectual legacy, begins his preface to the 1984 edition of
Spirits in Bondage
by remarking that “we are all young once.” This is just the right defense, for Lewis’s immaturity radiates from every page. He published the book under the pseudonym of “Clive Hamilton,” wedding his disliked first name to his mother’s maiden name, as he explained to Albert, in order to avoid sarcastic asides from his fellow soldiers about “our b
____
y lyrical poet.” Albert may have noticed, however, that the armistice was signed and Lewis demobilized and secure in Oxford’s ivory towers before the book appeared on March 20, 1919. A more painful explanation may have occurred to him, that his son’s pseudonym was a declaration of filial independence. The name carries, too, implications of an identity adrift. “I was at this time living,” Lewis recalls in
Surprised by Joy
, “in a whirl of contradictions.” He did not believe in God; he blamed God for not existing; he blamed God for making the world. From this intellectual chaos he had evolved, as we have seen, a somewhat Gnostic perspective, admitting to his picture of the cosmos, if not God, at least something he called “Spirit,” which calls to us through Beauty and is locked in battle with matter.

This is the ideology that permeates the poetry of
Spirits in Bondage
. Happily, Lewis did not let it infect his aesthetic choices. Spirit may be, as he wrote to Arthur, “matter’s great enemy,” and yet as a poet he depicted the gossamer realm of spirit with lush, earthy imagery drawn from the material world. Typical is “Death in Battle,” the last poem in the collection but the very first of his works to be professionally published, appearing in John Galsworthy’s magazine
Reveille
two months before
Spirits in Bondage
came out. Here the poet, on the battlefield, “driven and hurt beyond bearing,” petitions for admission to a higher, purer world. Lewis paints this spiritual abode in a series of vivid (if not always original) images, as “the peaceful castle, rosy in the West,” “the sweet dim Isle of Apples,” “flowery valleys,” “dewy upland places,” the “garden of God,” a “Country of Dreams!” The poem is lovely, taut, unsentimental, suffused with nostalgia for paradise. Similar is “Ballade Mystique,” identified by Warnie as expressing his brother’s “considered opinion of his own youth,” in which the poet proclaims his wretchedness among his friends and moons over a land “Beyond the western ocean’s glow / Whither the faerie galleys steer.”

These are among the best of the matter-vs.-spirit poems. Elsewhere in the book, Lewis shows his age. In “Satan Speaks,” oddly suggestive of a later era’s heavy-metal album lyrics, the devil celebrates his own dark majesty, his seductive disguises (“I am the flower and the dewdrop fresh / I am the lust in your itching flesh”) and his cruelty (“I am the spider making her net / I am the beast with jaws blood-wet”). “De Profundis” curses God artlessly (“Come let us curse our Master ere we die, / for all our hopes in endless ruin lie. / The good is dead. Let us curse God most High”), in a vein reminiscent of A. E. Housman. Not until much later would Lewis see the justice of Chesterton’s observation that “the curse against God is ‘Exercise I’ in the primer of minor poetry.”

Often—too often—Lewis laments the weight of life, the ravages of time, the falsity of hope (“But lo!, I am grown wiser, knowing that our own hearts / Have made a phantom called the Good…”). How weary to bear the world’s weight upon one’s shoulders! Has any twenty-year-old been as old as Lewis? Yet alongside the precocious spiritual and moral exhaustion, one spies glints and flashes of something more—not only the longing for Joy that emerges in so many images of fairies and western islands and gardens of delight, hinting at the Perelandrian and Narnian fantasies to come, but also, here and there, an appreciation of the stolid, beefy England that both Tolkien and Lewis would later defend in their writings. “In Praise of Solid People” declares

Thank God that there are solid folk

Who water flowers and roll the lawn,

And sit and sew and talk and smoke,

And snore all through the summer dawn.

Even better is the astonishing “The Ass,” in which the poet, wandering in the heather, encounters a sleepy brown ass and wonders

Can it be true, as the wise men tell,

That you are a mask of God as well,

And, as in us, so in you no less

Speaks the eternal Loveliness.

In its pastoral serenity, its humor (“O big, brown brother out of the waste, / How do thistles for breakfast taste?”), its Franciscan love of lowly creatureliness, this is a poem one might expect from Lewis at fifty years of age; it is a happy harbinger of things to come.