The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (30 page)

The metaphorical language in Lewis’s account of his conversion may signal that in at least some instances poetic considerations trump strict historical accuracy: “And so the great Angler played His fish and I never dreamed that the hook was in my mouth.” On the other hand, it scarcely surprises that there are discrepancies in chronology. The shift from acknowledging Spirit (abstract noun) to adoring Spirit (personal noun), though tremendous in its implications, may well be a gradual transformation too subtle to date. In any event, if the artistic play of imagery, the conscious shaping of the tale, is everywhere evident, so, too, is the power and the glory of it. As a reviewer in
The Times Literary Supplement
noted, “the tension of these final chapters holds the interest like the close of a thriller.”

A Walk at Night

Lewis was now half-ready—and perhaps more than half-willing, perhaps even eager—to know the embrace of a personal God. He couldn’t be sure, at first, about what demands God would make—the surrender of Joy might be, he surmised, one of the first. Nonetheless, God’s will be done; for God, being God, the fullness of goodness, power, beauty, and truth, deserves obedience; or as Lewis puts it, “To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.” He discovered one immediate blessing: his relentless introspection, which had plagued him since childhood, abated. He ended his diary. Instead, he learned to pray and read the Bible, attended church, and corresponded with Griffiths, by this time a convinced Christian. He ascribes these acts to his “sense of honor”; now a theist, he thought he should behave like one, even if it meant enduring “the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! the bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing,” and, worst of all, the hymns and organ music.

All this suggests a deliberate catechumenate, as if Lewis already knew, at least subliminally—as most future converts know, long before the decision dawns in consciousness—where he would wind up. “‘Where has religion reached its true maturity? Where, if anywhere, have the hints of all Paganism been fulfilled?’” he began to ask himself, according to
Surprised by Joy
. “Paganism had been only the childhood of religion, or only a prophetic dream. Where was the thing full grown? or where was the awakening?” Chesterton had helped to convince him that there were only two conceivable answers: Christianity and Hinduism (the latter would, decades later, help to lure Griffiths away from European monasticism into an intermonastic—some would say syncretistic—Christian ashram). But he must have guessed the answer even as he posed the question. For Hinduism, all of Lewis’s reading and thinking and desiring proclaimed, was too ahistorical and too redolent of humanity’s pagan childhood to win the day, while Christianity offered Christ, in all His incarnate numinosity, the culmination of all myth, the perfection of all paganism, the Joy within Joy. As a result, Lewis told Arthur, he felt he had found a genuine way to rekindle his Romanticism and keep it permanently aflame.

Lewis’s brother and friends knew where he belonged. On May 9, 1931, Warnie became a Christian, writing in his diary that “I started to say my prayers again after having discontinued doing so for more years than I care to remember” and adding that his conversion was not an irrational impulse but the conclusion of a long process, resting upon materialism’s failure to explain the origins of life and “the inherent improbability of the whole of existence being fortuitous.” Lewis makes no mention of Warnie’s conversion as an influence upon his own. The two brothers liked, admired, and took counsel from each other, however, so we may assume with some confidence that Jack was swayed, perhaps at a level more fundamental than rational analysis, by Warnie’s action.

A few months later, Lewis’s friends joined the argument. On September 19, 1931, an event unfolded that has acquired its own mythic numinosity in the minds of Inklings lovers: the Night of Addison’s Walk. Lewis, Tolkien, and their mutual friend, Hugo Dyson, strolled for hours along Addison’s Walk—a tree-lined path within Magdalen College circling a meadow bordered by the River Cherwell—discussing the nature of myth and its relation to Christianity. Lewis insisted that myths are essentially lies; Tolkien countered that myths are essentially true, for they reflect and transmit, in secondary form, the primary and primordial creative power of God. Tolkien later reworked the conversations of that night in “Mythopoeia,” a soliloquy in heroic couplets addressed by Philomythus (myth-lover
=
Tolkien) to Misomythus (myth-hater
=
Lewis) and dedicated “To one who said that myths were lies and therefore worthless, even though ‘breathed through silver.’”

Moreover, Tolkien argued—and this was the crux of the matter—that in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus we discover a myth that has entered history. Here God tells—indeed, enacts—a tale with all the beauty and wonder and symbolic power of myth, and yet a tale that is actually true. It was a strange thought, but it reminded Lewis of an offhand remark he had heard five years before from the atheist Harry Weldon. “Rum thing,” Weldon had said, “all that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” It looked as if it had really happened once—and yet it lost none of its mythic power for having become fact.

Tolkien’s exposition hit home; as he talked, a strong wind rustled the overhanging leaves, and all three noted, as Lewis put it, “the ecstasy of such a thing”—almost like the passing-by of a god, or of God. At 3:00 a.m., Tolkien headed home, but Dyson sustained the offensive, delineating the blessings that come from a Christian life, as he and Lewis walked in the cloister garden of New Building. They went to bed at 4:00 a.m.

This night of Lewis’s passion—intellectual, as it must surely be—bore fruit on a sunny morning a week or so later. The key moment came, as in Lewis’s conversion to theism, while he rode a vehicle, this time not a bus ascending Headington Hill but the sidecar of Warnie’s motorcycle as the brothers motored toward Whipsnade Zoo, a new animal park thirty miles north of London. “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.” Henceforth, Joy “lost nearly all interest” for him. He had found, and would henceforth worship and defend with all his might, the very reason for Joy, the Almighty Maker of Joy. On October 1, Lewis wrote to Greeves, “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity … My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”

The Pilgrim’s Regress

Aside from brief mention in his letters, the first record of Lewis’s conversion to Christianity was the allegorical novel
The Pilgrim’s Regress
, written in a white heat in August 1932, while Lewis was staying with Greeves in Northern Ireland, and published the following May (Lewis, who rarely wrote second drafts, excelled in lightning-fast production of this sort). Modeled on Bunyan’s
The Pilgrim’s Progress
,
The Pilgrim’s Regress
tells of a boy named John who flees the stern Landlord of Puritania in search of a far-off Island that awakens in him “a sweetness and a pang,” an indescribable yearning. The island, of course, is Joy, and John’s odyssey is Lewis’s own. John’s quest takes him past the “barren, aching rocks” of the north (“rigid systems, whether sceptical or dogmatic”) and the “foetid swamps” of the south (“the smudging of all frontiers, the relaxation of all resistances”) before he learns, with the help of Reason and Mother Kirk, to steer a middle course that brings him, after numerous adventures, to the Island—which he discovers, in the sort of narrative loop beloved by artistic young authors (and deployed by Chesterton, from whom Lewis may have learned the trick), to be nothing other than an outcropping of his homeland, Puritania. The book offers giants, dragons, virgins; a landscape whose features signify spiritual states; characters named Mr. Angular, Vertue, Mr. Sensible. In these rich inventions and in the happy, hard-won culmination of John’s quest, Lewis produces a clever homage and, in part, a worthy sequel to Bunyan’s masterpiece.

But there is something amiss. Lewis himself admits as much in his preface to the third edition; the tale suffers from “needless obscurity, and an uncharitable temper.” The first fault, relatively minor, Lewis ascribes to his na
ï
ve understanding of Romanticism and his equally na
ï
ve assumption that John is truly Everyman, that his (and Lewis’s) path to Christianity is that of every pilgrim; the difficulties of writing allegory, especially one that suits the modern temperament, also played a part. It is the second fault that grates. The tale abounds in straw men, set up to be knocked down. John is faced, not with a series of personified virtues and vices such as Bunyan’s Christian faces, but with a catalog of Lewis’s b
ê
tes noires, with Theosophists, high Anglicans, scholastics, modernists, materialists, rationalists, Freudians, Hegelians, pantheists, and exponents of “Oriental pessimism and self-torture.” Satire overwhelms wit; vulgarity ensues, epitomized by Lewis’s depiction of an avant-garde party in which all the women look like men and all the men like women, and one of the “Clevers” sings to the crowd, in crude parody of the poetry of Eliot and other modernists, “Globol obol ookle ogle globol gloogle gloo.” The book, for all its good intentions and brilliant passages, lacks what Lewis himself lacked at the time: the gentleness of charity. Like many young converts, he makes too strong a case. He would spend the following decades learning how to cut his venom with honey.

It’s noteworthy that Lewis wrote
The Pilgrim’s Regress
while completing
The Allegory of Love.
He was also experimenting with allegory in an alliterative poem, “The Planets,” written because “the character of the planets, as conceived by medieval astrology, seem to me to have a permanent value as spiritual symbols—to provide a Ph
ä
nomenologie des Geistes which is specially worth while in our own generation.” For the poets of classical antiquity, Lewis observed, allegory was the sleeping chamber of the fading gods; for Christians the planetary gods could live on, in this poetically diminished form, as conduits and symbols of the moral life: “the twilight of the gods is the mid-morning of the personifications.” The idea was attractive to Lewis, the lover of myth, for why, he reasoned, should dullness be the price for monotheistic conversion? Why shouldn’t the planetary intelligences continue their dance under the all-ruling Sun, just as they did in the Christian Middle Ages? The Lewis scholar Michael Ward has suggested in his deeply insightful
Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis
, that planetary symbolism is the key to much else in Lewis’s work,
The Chronicles of Narnia
above all. At the very least, Lewis never abandoned the medieval model of the cosmos, even though the lukewarm outcome of
The Pilgrim’s Regress
taught him to wear his allegory lightly.

“Something Was Broken”

Meanwhile, Barfield, uncertain about his career, had relocated to London. His passion for dancing and theater remained, but passion does not translate easily into a good income. He had enjoyed some success placing poems and essays but longed to tackle a more significant work; perhaps, he thought, he could make a go of it as a literary man. In 1929, while on holiday with Maud in Germany, he began work on a long novel of manners,
English People
. The book recounts the interactions of young people as they discourse on Christianity, psychoanalysis, art, literature, occultism, and other concerns of the day. It features a German seer named Karl Brockmann, obviously modeled upon Steiner, some bright prose (Lewis, in a letter to Arthur, praises Barfield’s account of falling asleep), and numerous occult ruminations. It never found a publisher. Barfield, devastated by this failure, turned his back upon a writing career. What next? With a family to support—he and Maud had adopted a child, Alexander (b. 1928), in 1929—earning money had become imperative. He found a viable if not happy solution around 1930 by joining his father’s London law firm, a small company that specialized in probate and real estate law and the like. He learned the ropes, passed the solicitor’s exam, and practiced law for the next thirty years.

His friendship with Lewis was changing, too. At the end of 1929, Lewis had visited him and Maud for four days, and the two friends had a splendid time talking and poring over Aristotle’s
Ethics
and Dante’s
Paradiso
in “an uninterrupted feast.” But all the while, Lewis was harboring doubts about the relationship. He mentions in a letter to Arthur, while recounting staying awake with Barfield until dawn to hear the cock crow, that “Barfield doesn’t really taste a thing like that as keenly as you and I.” Barfield felt the estrangement keenly, certainly more keenly than Lewis, and “had the feeling that something was broken” between the two. The friendship was entering a new phase, still warm but more remote. In September 1931, Barfield attempted to reopen the “Great War,” but Lewis rejected the overture. “I don’t think I ever heard him speak with such emotion,” recalled Barfield. “He simply refused to talk at that sort of depth at all. I remember his saying, and again with more emotion than I ever heard him express: I can’t bear it!”

Why should he bear it? Lewis, a newly minted Christian, had a new religious cosmos to explore and new opponents to challenge. Barfield, rooted in his old beliefs, felt hurt and half-abandoned. In the 1940s, the bitterness he experienced over the situation would erupt in satire—written in Greek and parodying the prologue of the Gospel according to John—squarely directed at his friend (whom he calls the “philosopher”). “Biographia Theologica” remains, in its portrait of Lewis as an arrogant, spiritually blind philosopher-prophet, the harshest—perhaps the only truly harsh—thing that Barfield wrote. The English translation runs:

Lo, there was a certain philosopher, and the philosopher knew himself, that he was one. And the Word that came about in the philosopher was the one God. And the Word was the light of his philosophy. And the light shines in the philosophy, and the philosopher knew it not. It was in the philosopher, and the philosophy came about through it, and the philosopher knew it not. And indeed, the philosopher denied that anyone is ever able in any way to behold the light. But when he beheld the light, the philosopher said that its name was “Lord.” And the philosophy bore testimony to the light, that it is the Word and the life of men [
anthrop
ō
n
], and to the philosopher, that he was born not of blood, nor of the will of flesh, nor of the will of man [
andros
], nor through a command of a lord, but of God. But the philosopher did not comprehend the testimony.