The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (53 page)

The first of these critical battles, a lively but gentlemanly debate with the Milton scholar E.M.W. Tillyard, published as
The Personal Heresy: A Controversy
(1939), was Lewis’s chance to air his disapproval of the fatal subjectivism of critics who treat poetry as covert autobiography. The sparks really flew, however, when Lewis joined battle with an influential school of criticism seated in the colleges and lecture halls of Cambridge University. By 1931, as we have seen, Lewis and Tolkien had successfully fended off a modernist revision of the Oxford English syllabus (though skirmishes would continue until the 1960s). The English faculty at Cambridge, by contrast, was more open to innovation; the syllabus had been revised in 1917 to encompass modern and even international studies, and a radical new approach to reading, evaluating, and teaching English literature was gathering momentum.

The historic rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge played a part in shaping these differences; and a bit of background is needed to see where the battle lines would be drawn. Ever since Isaac Newton’s days, Cambridge had been the dominant force in mathematics and natural philosophy. The Apostles, an undergraduate secret society founded in 1820 to foster debate on the topics of the day, counted among its members a pantheon of physicists, economists, historians, politicians, philosophers, theologians, poets, and critics. During and after the Edwardian period, many of the Apostles had ties to the Bloomsbury Group, and shared in Bloomsbury’s devotion to social radicalism and destabilizing aesthetic and sexual experiences. In this atmosphere of scientific positivism and iconoclastic aestheticism, I. A. Richards, a student of G. E. Moore, developed a bold theory of poetry and criticism.

Richards was a charismatic teacher, an early champion of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, developer with C. K. Ogden of an international “Basic English” (Orwell’s “Newspeak”), a polymath and adventurer who climbed mountains and mastered Chinese in his spare time. He was also a communist, with a particular admiration for Mao. His aim as a scholar and teacher was to establish literary studies on a sound scientific footing, freed from vague and obscurantist metaphysical notions. Drawing upon psychoanalysis, neurophysiology, linguistics, and analytical philosophy, Richards developed the method of “Practical Criticism,” involving close reading, analysis of the multiple meanings present in a text, and observation of the effects such meanings have on the attentive reader. In a post-Christian, morally rudderless world (as Richards diagnosed the situation), when poetry was all that remained of the mythopoeic faculty, it fell to criticism to address the great needs of culture. “To set up as a critic,” Richards wrote in 1924, “is to set up as a judge of values.” This was Matthew Arnold with a distinctly modern, positivistic spin. Richards trained his students to distinguish the emotive language of poetry from the fact-language of science, to analyze the number and range of “appetencies” that a poem is able to satisfy, and to detect and uproot the “stock responses” and “doctrinal adhesions” that stand in the way of an authentic response to poetry—and to life.

Richards’s following at Cambridge was fervent; huge crowds attended his lectures on Practical Criticism; as the halls filled up, he took to lecturing in the streets. Christopher Isherwood, who attended Richards’s lectures before dropping out of Cambridge, described the phenomenon in a 1938 memoir:

Here, at last, was the prophet we had been waiting for … he was infinitely more than a brilliant new literary critic: he was our guide, our evangelist, who revealed to us, in a succession of astounding lightning-flashes, the entire expanse of the Modern World … Poetry wasn’t a holy flame, a fire-bird from the moon; it was a group of interrelated stimuli acting upon the ocular nerves, the semi-circular canals, the brain, the solar plexus, the digestive and sexual organs. It did you medically demonstrable good, like a dose of strychnine or salts. We became behaviourists, materialists, atheists. In our conversation we substituted the word “emotive” for the word “beautiful.”

Oxford was slower to appreciate Richards. When he visited Magdalen College in the late 1920s or early ’30s and was placed in Lewis’s hands, his reception was decidedly chilly—if we can trust Richards’s own account many years later to a biographer. Lewis, it seems, had forgotten to reserve lodgings for his distinguished guest, and so, as a makeshift, placed Richards in R. G. Collingwood’s temporarily vacant rooms. Before retiring for the night, Lewis brought Richards his own annotated copy of Richards’s masterpiece,
Principles of Literary Criticism
(1924), saying, “Here’s something that should put you to sleep.” But Richards passed a restless night after reading Lewis’s detailed critical comments in the margins.

Lewis’s relationship with F. R. Leavis was even more fraught. For a time a passionate disciple of Richards, Leavis was every bit as charismatic in the lecture hall; “when Leavis read poetry during a lecture,” one admirer said, “it could seem as if for the moment the world stopped.” Though for most of his career he was connected only peripherally to the Cambridge English faculty, he was, in John Wain’s words, the “one man who has, almost single-handed, turned the university study of ‘English’ from a placid, rather stagnant ornamental lake to a choppy and sometimes tempestuous sea.” As one former student put it, Leavis trained his followers to read critically “as if our very lives depended upon it.” Although Leavis gave warm encouragement to his own students, he was acutely sensitive to perceived slights from colleagues and delighted in uncovering the deficiencies of his literary adversaries; he “cultivated to perfection the sneer which he used like an oyster knife,” as Noel Annan said.

In 1932, Leavis founded the quarterly review
Scrutiny
, editing the journal with his wife, Q. D. “Queenie” Leavis, until 1953. The journal’s name—taken from Edgell Rickword’s
Scrutinies
, a two-volume anthology of iconoclastic criticism—has a religious connotation, calling to mind the Lenten Scrutinies, a searching self-examination intended to fortify the faithful against corrupting influences. As such,
Scrutiny
carried out a thoroughgoing revaluation of the English literary canon, discrediting Milton (see above), exalting Donne and Marvell, and admitting a small number of more modern authors (Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and D. H. Lawrence) to the empyrean that Leavis called the Great Tradition. Evaluative criticism, as the Leavises practiced it, was a moral crusade. They and their disciples would be the “saving remnant” of which Matthew Arnold spoke, exposing the degradation of “mass culture,” industrialization, consumerism, and technocracy, lamenting the loss of organic communal life, and training their disciples in a discipline of fine discrimination that would stem the rising tide of philistine vulgarity. Not just literary excellence, but the future of civilization, depended upon such criticism.

John Wain recalled engaging “in several long conversations with Leavisites before I realized that all they were doing was to get me to condemn myself out of my own mouth, so that they could go back to Cambridge and add mine to the row of wax images over the slow fire.” Lewis figured prominently among those wax images; to the Leavis circle, he was a romantic nationalist, “nostalgically addicted” to the Anglo-Saxon past, whose zeal for Christianity had warped his critical faculties. When Lewis published
Rehabilitations
in 1939
—
a rejoinder to the “Revaluations” series in
Scrutiny
—contributing editor L. C. Knights of
Scrutiny
slammed the book for combining “a distaste for ‘highbrow’ literature with an aversion from radical enquiries concerning the academic
status quo
.”
The Great Divorce
should be censored by church authorities, one reviewer wrote, not for heresy, but for the worse sin of “persistent nourishment of false attitudes.” Worst of all, Lewis seemed to the Leavis circle to be a privileged insider, the very embodiment of the Oxford English faculty, with all the power and entitlements of the academic literary establishment at his disposal, while they remained persecuted and misunderstood outsiders. As Queenie Leavis (a formidable critic in her own right) wrote in a 1943 issue of
Scrutiny
:

Rehabilitations
was warmly received in academic quarters, where Mr. Lewis was credited with brilliant wit and a powerful intellect, and from thence came assertions that a blow had been struck for the cause. A really up-to-date intellectual, combining the scholarly virtues with critical genius, had taken service under them, we were given to understand. If there had been the slightest indication of originality in Mr. Lewis’s outlook or of criticism of the
status quo
in his programme, what outraged bellows would have come from that herd instead! We may conclude that the academic club will go on recruiting its kind so long as it has a stranglehold on appointments in nearly every university.

It was high time, said Mrs. Leavis, to take English studies “out of the hands of the old-style academic.” English studies “must be cut free from the classical-scholarly tradition in every respect and at every level; must point out firmly that the ability to edit texts and make piddling comments on them is no more qualification by itself for an English university post than a certificate of librarianship.” The doors must be opened to admit “new and uniquely equipped specialists” who will remake not just English studies but the whole university curriculum.
Scrutiny
eschewed political ideology and had as many partisans on the Right as on the Left, as well as a significant Catholic following; but where the cause of English studies was concerned, it was
To the barricades!
“Can anyone be so optimistic as to believe,” wrote Queenie Leavis, “that any university reform less violent than a bloody revolution would make such a programme possible?”

A third major figure in the new critical movement, William Empson, was a gifted and witty critic and a fine poet, a disciple of Richards who wrote his masterpiece,
Seven Types of Ambiguity
, when he was only twenty-two, but was banished from Cambridge upon the discovery of condoms in his Magdalene College rooms. Kingsley Amis had the impression, during the war years in Oxford, that everybody was reading either
Seven Types of Ambiguity
or
The Allegory of Love
—presumably revealing their true colors by the choice they made. Yet Empson himself greatly admired
The Allegory of Love
, wrote a gracious unsigned review of
Studies in Words
in which he takes special delight in Lewis’s rebuttal of “Professor Empson,” and made it plain that he liked Lewis personally (“I wish I had seen more of C. S. Lewis,” he once said). He just couldn’t fathom how such a decent man as Lewis could worship the vindictive Christian God, let alone compose apologetic tracts on His behalf. In July 1945, alarmed by a rumor that Lewis was in the running to succeed Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch as King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, Empson wrote to Richards to say, “The gossip is that C. S. Lewis is going to get it, and I cannot forgive him for believing that pet animals live for ever because they have been taught nice feelings by their owners. He seems to have no interests now except his moralising.” Those disgusting “neo-Christians” (Empson’s term) were all around.

The three major prophets of the new critical movement—Richards, Leavis, Empson—only sporadically agreed with one another and in the end were not on speaking terms. Yet something like a school did emerge from their efforts. By the 1940s, their principles and methods were carried by disciples into secondary education, shaping curricula and examinations and producing textbooks like
The Control of Language
by Alec King and Martin Ketley—Lewis’s target under the name
The Green Book
in
The Abolition of Man
. In American English departments, New Criticism acknowledged Richards as a spiritual father, and the technique of “close reading” proved to be a lasting contribution to English studies on both sides of the Atlantic. At Oxford, F. W. Bateson and W. W. Robson (a devoted student of David Cecil, an admirer of Chesterton, and a not unsympathetic critic of Lewis and Williams) offered a version of Leavisism without the melodrama.

Was there, then, an Oxford School to counteract this incursion from Cambridge? Not so much a school, John Wain recalled, as an
ethos
: “When I was an Oxford undergraduate I was taught simple appreciation; I read an enormous number of authors, in rapid succession, and in each case I learnt to pick out what could be ‘said for’ the man. Nobody taught me, as Cambridge undergraduates seem to be taught, that every author has to get through a kind of sieve, called Criticism, before he is considered worth reading.” Only at Oxford would a candidate in English encounter the examination question “What seems to you lastingly delightful in
Paradise Lost
?”

What seems to you lastingly delightful?
For all their differences, the Inklings and the Cambridge critics shared an interest in the lastingly delightful (even if the Cantabridgians downplayed it in formal study). They believed with all their heart and soul in the power of the literary imagination to create a world worth living in. When the battle between these two camps heated up during the last years of Lewis’s life (see chapter 18), the contest was all the more bitter because of their underlying agreement.

14

LOSS AND GAIN

As the war wound down, so did Charles Williams. “I’m even more of a … prophet? priest? something—more of a Voice and less of a man everywhere except at home,” he wrote Florence in mid-February 1945. “I am always aware of a gulf. My voice—or my style—goes across it, but my heart doesn’t.” He was tired, lonely, unable to escape the disparity between outward eloquence and inward uncertainties.

Once he had rejoiced in Oxford’s intellectual glamour, but now he longed for home. “I wish you and I were spending a cosy evening alone,” he told his wife, expanding this desire a few weeks later into “all I want in this world is you, a bearable place to live, some money & enough distant publicity to bring in the money and be amusing. Nothing more.” He turned to his old acolyte, Alice Hadfield, for long walks on the High Street and long talks in the King’s Arms. He spun for her his dazzling web of words, telling of dreams unrealized, of books on Milton and Wordsworth that in his straitened circumstances he could not afford to write, of hopes for self-improvement that he could not afford to relinquish. Mostly he seemed preoccupied with former days. An old man (old at fifty-eight!), he rehearsed his life, as the ancient do. Some of this was simply exhaustion: in 1944, in addition to his full-time editing post at OUP, he had delivered forty-seven lectures and written part or all of multiple books, including a new novel entitled
All Hallows’ Eve
, a study of Arthurian legend, and a biography of the Reverend W. H. Flecker, headmaster of Dean Close School in Cheltenham and father of the Georgian poet James Elroy Flecker. The insignificance of this last project tells us how much Williams had thinned out. Great themes had fled him; his prose was now little more than journalism. As
All Hallows’ Eve
rushed to a conclusion, he declared himself “bitterly disappointed in it.”