The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (25 page)

Dymer
finally did make its mark—it was published by Dent, Lewis’s friends were encouraging, and there were a number of highly positive reviews. AE (under the pseudonym “V.O.”) had kind things to say about it in
The Irish Statesman.
The detective novelist Rupert Croft-Cooke called it a “great poem” in
G.K.’s Weekly
. The most favorable notice, by the poet and critic Hugh l’Anson Fausset in
The Times Literary Supplement
, called the poem “notable because it is in the epic tradition and yet is modern in idiom and reflects a profoundly personal intuition” in which the hero’s adventure takes place “not on the high seas but in the swamps and arid places of his own soul-making.” But the triumph was fleeting; the book did not sell, and the more enthusiastic reviews struck Lewis as “silly.”

The problem was this: the poem, taken stanza by stanza, gleams like gold, but it is partly fool’s gold. At least that is how
The Poetry Review
saw it in November 1926: “One is little impressed by the allegory that is hard to understand, amazed at the alternate flashes of brilliance and dullness in the style of writing, and wholly delighted by the lyrical quality of many of the lines.” A friend of Barfield’s judged that “the metrical level is good, the vocabulary is large: but Poetry—not a line.” Coghill, whose appreciation for the spiritual themes had been an encouragement to Lewis, admitted later that he was never quite sure what the poem meant; he just knew that it felt mysteriously significant, and though he didn’t say this to Lewis, he judged that its “Pre-Raphaelite stained glass imagery” and its “toe-hold in Wardour Street” (a reference to its pseudoarchaic language, the same problem that afflicted Tolkien) would prevent it from having lasting power. Coghill was convinced that Lewis was better at prose than poetry, and more than one reviewer agreed: the stories would be captivating, if only the verse didn’t get in the way
.

Lewis was crushed. There was no way to deflect a verdict shared so widely by critics he respected (in a letter to Harwood he quoted John Henry Newman quoting Augustine:
Securus judicat orbis terrarum
—the world is a sure judge). Later he told Arthur, who was suffering similar agonies about his painting, that “from the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition, from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on wh. I really & deliberately staked my whole contentment: and I recognise myself as having unmistakably failed in it.” He had worshipped at poetry’s altar and monitored himself, as well as his friends, for any sign of flagging devotion to the art. A decade earlier or a few decades later he might have fared better, but he had the misfortune to publish just as the critical tide turned against narrative poetry, against formal rhyme and meter, against pastoral landscapes, heroic quests, and archaisms of all kinds. His middling talent could not buck the modernist surge, and his dream collapsed. Even after he abandoned hope of poetic greatness, however, his love for poetry never ceased. He continued to turn out short lyric verse, and he labored for two decades (1918–1938) on a narrative poem transposing the Hippolytus myth to fairyland, reciting it, under the title “The Queen of Drum,” at a 1938 “Oxford Summer Diversion.” It remained unpublished during his lifetime.

Realism …

Finishing
Dymer
coincided with another sea change in Lewis’s life. As an adolescent he had learned to view the universe as “a meaningless dance of atoms” and had assumed a Romantic posture in defiance of this harsh truth. By the time he had completed
Dymer
, however, Lewis had taken his first steps in the direction of a Romanticism without defiance, a Romanticism wedded to sanity and reason.

To accomplish this, he needed to decouple poetry and magic. He’d had enough of the hankering for mystical secrets that had made a tawdry spectacle of the great poet Yeats, turned the benign Leo Baker into an alarming enigma, and sent more than a few of his contemporaries into sectarian coteries or worse. He’d had enough of second-rate revelations from the spirit world and psychical researchers whose proof of an afterlife was always just around the corner. There was “Cranny,” the Reverend Frederick Walker MacRan, an Anglo-Irish priest and friend of Mrs. Moore who had entered Holy Orders without believing in Christ and had ended up—as Lewis describes him in
Surprised by Joy
—“an old, dirty, gabbling, tragic, Irish parson” and an unwelcome weekend guest, obsessed with finding evidence for survival of death. His fellow student, Pasley, had become a spiritualist and was, Lewis thought, much the worse for it
.
“The whole question of immortality became rather disgusting to me,” Lewis writes in
Surprised by Joy
; it was encouraging to find that Barfield, though desperate to find an alternative to pessimistic materialism, shared his friend’s contempt for pie-in-the-sky consolations.

Most disturbing of all was the descent into madness of Mrs. Moore’s brother, John “Doc” Askins, who was now living nearby with his family. Lewis enjoyed his company, and when Askins held forth on his favorite metaphysical subjects, whether Atlantis or the afterlife, Lewis was a willing sounding board. On one such occasion, however, Askins bared his soul; he was haunted by evil thoughts, terrified of Hell, convinced of his own sinfulness. Lewis was unsure whether the pathology stemmed from actual misdeeds or subconscious impulses, from untreated syphilis or war neurosis. Things soon came to a crisis, and Mrs. Moore insisted they shelter her brother as he writhed on the floor, tortured by fiendish blasphemies and thoughts of imminent damnation, while his wife (a consummate witch in Lewis’s opinion) was having fits of her own upstairs. A doctor was sent for, and later a policeman. Lewis needed all his strength to hold Doc down while they chloroformed him. He was hospitalized, only to die three weeks later when his exhausted heart gave out.

The worst part of this experience for Lewis, who had been suffering nightmares of his own, was the feeling of being drawn into a maelstrom—“a sort of horrible sympathy with the Doc’s yellings and grovellings—a cursed feeling that I could quite easily do it myself.” It seemed to him, moreover, that Askins had opened himself to spiritual invasion by dabbling in the arcana of theosophy, yoga, and psychoanalysis. An ardent spiritualist friend, the wife of Lewis’s history tutor, hardly helped matters with her suggestion that Askins’s troubles would end as soon as he crossed over to the etheric plane. Yeats, Cranny, dear Miss Cowie, and now Doc Askins—the message could not be more clear: “it was to this, this raving on the floor, that all romantic longings and unearthly speculations led a man in the end.” Lewis resolved to be normal: “Safety first, thought I: the beaten track, the approved road, the center of the road, the lights on.” He wrote to warn Arthur: “Keep clear of introspection, of brooding, of spiritualism, of everything eccentric. Keep to work and sanity and open air—to the cheerful & the matter of fact side of things. We hold our mental health by a thread: & nothing is worth risking it for.”

This commitment to commonsense, stoical realism “satisfied an emotional need,” he tells us in
Surprised by Joy
. “I wanted Nature to be quite independent of our observation; something other, indifferent, self-existing.” He would accept the universe as it is: “No more Avalon, no more Hesperides. I had … ‘seen through’ them. And I was never going to be taken in again.” His spiritual longings could be safely reclassified as aesthetic longings and enjoyed as such; for as his philosophy tutor E. F. Carritt (fellow in philosophy at University College and a disciple of Benedetto Croce) assured him, art was a sphere of its own in which even the most hardheaded realist could take moral holidays.

 … And Idealism

But Lewis was not consistent.
Surprised by Joy
depicts a steady progression from materialism to idealism to pantheism to Christianity, but Lewis’s letters and diary entries—often at odds with the chronology in his memoir—show that he was trying out various philosophical positions throughout the 1920s. This is what intellectual development is really like; as Lewis liked to point out, only the stodgiest of thinkers advances from one worldview to the next in an orderly fashion, as if traveling by train from station to station. And Lewis was certainly not stodgy; his mind was in constant motion. He was fully aware that the commonsense realism (the position he calls, in
Surprised by Joy
, “the New Look”) that he had adopted as a defense against eccentricity and brooding could not satisfy all of his intellectual and spiritual needs. Barfield had shown him the contradictions in his position; he was trying to have it both ways—to accept “as rock-bottom reality the universe revealed by the senses” but also to shield his logical, moral, and aesthetic judgments from scientific explanations that would empty them of truth-value. He wanted—needed—to overcome the antinomies in his thought, but it would mean hard philosophical work; he would have to formulate a philosophy of mind and matter coherent enough to withstand critical scrutiny.

If realism failed, the obvious place to turn to was idealism. Idealism had been the dominant philosophical school in Britain from the mid-to-late nineteenth century and still had significant influence. For the classically educated, idealism of one sort or another was a natural tendency; everyone at least knew Plato. Broad sympathy for the school, accompanied by the patriotic thought that, although derived from Plato, Kant, and Hegel, it had now assumed a distinctively British form, created a climate favorable for the Oxford idealism associated with Thomas Hill Green (1836–82), F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923).

Oxford idealism was a complex brew—a system of metaphysics adapted from Kant and Hegel, and their Scottish exegetes McTaggart and Caird, and linked (though by tenuous threads) to a program of moral uplift and social reform. Distilled, it amounted to asserting the existence of a purely mental or spiritual Absolute and acknowledging the existence of things and individuals only as aspects of that Absolute. The real universe, the Oxford idealists maintained, is a single unified whole, a perfect Idea, however manifold and conflicted it may appear. Thus Bradley wrote, in a famous passage in
The Principles of Logic
, “That the glory of this world in the end is appearance leaves the world more glorious, if we feel it is a show of some fuller splendour; but the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat, if it hides some colourless movement of atoms…” Even though perceived through a sensuous curtain, reality is intrinsically intelligible; to awakened reason, the universe is already perfect and eternally at peace. It was an immensely consoling doctrine to one caught in a dreary materialist world; Lewis was particularly delighted by a remark he found in Bosanquet’s
Some Suggestions in Ethics
about the possibility of friendship with the lower animals: befriend an animal, Bosanquet said, and you will feel “as if the Absolute came to eat out of your hand.”

To be sure, this was not Lewis’s first encounter with idealism; he had been thoroughly steeped in Plato from his days reading classics with Kirkpatrick, loving everything in the Greek philosopher except the utopian despotism of the
Republic
. Lewis’s letters to Arthur Greeves on poetry and art read like Platonic rhapsodies on the transcendent reality of the beautiful. He even flirted with a dualism more Gnostic and Romantic than Platonic in tone, in which beauty, as pure spirit, was perennially at war with matter. From his bed in the military hospital at
É
taples, Lewis wrote to Arthur, “out here, where I see spirit continually dodging matter (shells, bullets, animal fears, animal pains) I have formulated my equation Matter
=
Nature
=
Satan. And on the other side Beauty, the only spiritual & not-natural thing that I have yet found.”

When, in 1923, Lewis decided to immerse himself in the idealism of Green, Bradley, and Bosanquet, he was a trifle embarrassed to be deserting his hard-won realism in order to follow what he thought was the dominant philosophical fashion. But he soon found out that idealism was already tottering on its high throne. G. E. Moore had published his “Refutation of Idealism” at Cambridge in 1903, and the analytical approach was poised to take Cambridge philosophy by storm, while in Oxford, the commonsense “direct realism” of Cook Wilson (which in turn gave rise to “ordinary language philosophy”) was in the ascendant. In 1901 the humanist F.C.S. Schiller (Oxford’s counterpart to the American pragmatist William James) published
Mind!
—a wicked and occasionally hilarious parody of the prestigious journal
Mind
—mocking his philosophical ancestors and elders (among them “F.H. Badly”) and interpreting Lewis Carroll’s
The Hunting of the Snark
as a Bradleian allegory for the pursuit of the Absolute (whose portrait, a blank sheet of pink translucent vellum paper, forms the frontispiece).

Lewis thus found himself caught between two philosophical worlds—he was one of the small band of returned soldiers (the Great War, in cutting a disproportionate swath through Oxbridge scholars, also decimated a whole generation of future philosophers) who found themselves outnumbered both by their seniors and by the rising generation who had been too young to serve in the war. The old guard were mainly idealists of one sort or another, while the newcomers were determined, with the help of recently honed logical and linguistic tools, to cut through the tangles left by their predecessors. Lewis’s generation would play a mediating role, not blazing new trails but seeing to it that the newcomers learned to understand their seniors before they consigned the old philosophy, with its soaring abstractions, to the dustbin.

Philosophical “isms” rise and fall like hemlines; real philosophers—and Lewis had the makings of one, even if his path led elsewhere—ignore fashions and steer clear of party politics. Thus, in his materialist period Lewis could sympathize with idealists, and in his idealist period he could appreciate the telling criticisms made by rival schools. It was useful to have idealism as a standpoint from which to teach (a classified ad from a desperate instructor in the back pages of
Mind!
read “W
ANTED IMMEDIATELY,
for Teaching Purposes, an I
NTELLIGIBLE
A
BSOLUTE.
Money no object. Apply to ‘Tutor’ c/o Ed., M
IND!”),
but Lewis soon found, when he had to face actual students, that “the Absolute cannot be made clear” and that British idealism, at least in its post-Berkeleyan form, consisted largely of “mystifications.”