Alastair
Fowler
C. S. Lewis: Supervisor
Yale Review, Vol. 91 No. 4 (October 2003), pp. 64–80
Note:
Alastair Fowler, Regius Professor Emeritus of the University of Edinburgh,
is the editor of Spenser’s Images of Life, a book published in 1967 on
the basis of C. S. Lewis’s notes for his Cambridge lectures on Edmund
Spenser’s Faerie Queene.
I am reproducing Professor Fowler’s paper without permission,
but still hoping it is allright. Following the relevant directions in the Yale
Review website, I have tried to contact the Journals Rights &
Permissons Coordinator at Blackwell’s ín Oxford; but both e-mail and p-mail
were returned as undeliverable.
Arend Smilde, Utrecht, The Netherlands
September 2004
How C. S. Lewis came to direct my doctoral
research calls for explanation. When I graduated from Edinburgh University in
1952, research awards encouraged me to go on to Oxford. But which college?
Information to inform the choice was then not easily available. Eventually,
after a false start and several interviews, I was accepted by the English
faculty and by Pembroke College. About Pembroke I knew nothing except its small
size. It turned out a happy choice; the vice‑gerent was a historian, R. B.
McCallum. He had worked on John Calvin and was interested in my proposed topic,
Protestant defenses of poetry. We agreed, against the general misconception,
that Calvin’s views on literature were liberal‑humanist. McCallum advised me to
approach the supervisor I wanted rather than wait to have one assigned to me.
The exciting thing about Oxford to me then was
the novelist Charles Williams; he must supervise my dissertation. Confident
that biographical criticism was irrelevant, I had failed to register the fact
of Williams’s death in 1945, Well, then, if Williams was unavailable, how about
his friend C. S. Lewis? For years I had enjoyed Out of the Silent Planet,
and The Allegory of Love was a high point of my Edinburgh reading. Yes, Lewis
must be my supervisor. But here a new difficulty arose. Lewis was averse to
supervised research; like many dons then, he considered it unlikely to improve
literary studies. (Of the three kinds of literacy at Oxford – literate,
illiterate, and B. Litterate – he preferred the first two.) He so often refused
to direct research that it is hard to think of exceptions at Oxford, apart from
those who, like Peter Bayley and Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green), were
already his pupils. Only Catherine Ing, M. M. McEldowney, and Mahmoud
Manzalaoui come to mind. When Lewis taught graduates from other universities,
he usually prepared them for a second undergraduate course. Being married and
poor, I had no leisure for that.
When I wrote to Lewis, he politely excused
himself; supervision was to him invita Minerva (uncongenial). Very well,
he would have to be persuaded. McCallum undertook to write; as a member of
Lewis’s Inklings group he knew him well. And he suggested consulting Henry
(“Hugo”) Dyson, an old friend of Lewis’s. Dyson, possibly Oxford’s sharpest
literary critic at the time, was the kindest of men and most uproarious –
capable of shouting across the street, “All right for money, Fowler?” He muted
his ebullience when I asked his help, and hesitated before writing Lewis a
pleading letter – conscious, perhaps, of asking a large favor? Summoning joint
memories to appeal to?
Armed with Dyson’s note, I approached the seat
of the spokesman of Old Western culture: through Magdalen lodge, round the cloisters in the shady Old
Quad, and suddenly out into a bright vista of the eighteenth‑century New
Building with its wisteria swags, patently regular against the enormous trees
of the deer park. Climbing the wrong stairs, I trod the bare, scrubbed boards
of Top Corridor smelling of freshly moistened wood and descended Lewis’s
staircase. With some sense of occasion – not nearly enough – I knocked and a
voice said, “Come in.” I crossed a large threshold into a north‑facing room
with a view of the deer park (“the Grove”); a sitting room with no one in it. I
was nonplussed, until a hearty summons from an open doorway directed me to a
smaller sitting room looking south to the rest of the college. Here the great
man defended the rampart of a desk. While he read Dyson’s note I took in the
room’s cream paneling; its cliffs of shelved literature (fewer books than
Dyson’s); its huge floral-patterned Chesterfield; its large, dim reproduction
of Botticelli’s Mars and Venus (one of the pictures Lewis most cared for
when he first visited the National Gallery in 1922). He re-read Dyson’s letter, pondered, and –
relented. He would take me on. Why? Had Dyson called in some indisputable debt?
Did I seem a potential Boswell to Lewis’s Dr. Johnson?
For our
first meeting I was to write on the sources of defenses of fiction. I must have
looked at a loss, for he started me off by jotting down a dozen or so authors
and titles, mostly Greek or Latin: Plato, Plotinus, Philostratus, Dio
Chrysostom, Fracastoro’s Naugerius, Philip Sidney’s Defence.
History of ideas, without the name. The tradition of imagination’s access to
metaphysical truth – the same tradition (assimilated from Owen Barfield) that
Lewis would trace in the Sidney chapter of his volume in The Oxford History
of English Literature, published a couple of years later. The assignment
would make me show my paces on ground fresh in Lewis’s memory. His OHEL
volume, just off his hands, summed fifteen years of work; so he was deeply read
in sixteenth-century writing without being inaccessibly a specialist.
A great
teacher and a great writer need not be an efficient supervisor. Lewis was too
permissive, and left me to get on with things. Perhaps this was deliberate; he
was to follow a similar method during his early years at Cambridge, where he
supervised David Daiches, Roger Poole, and others. Lewis never insisted I
should begin by reading secondary sources. He never insisted I should compile a
preliminary bibliography. He never insisted on anything. On the wild assumption
I shared his own powers, he gave me so much rope that I tied myself into a
ramifying topic that took five years to escape. Yet he gave generously of his
time, unlike most supervisors in those days, who were content to see a research
student for a few minutes a term. Lewis spent more than twenty hours exploring
the vast wildernesses of my ignorance. And this was in the same overfilled
terms when he fell in love with Joy Gresham and made his move to Cambridge. I
must have been a great nuisance to him; even as graduate students go, I was
raw. Yet, affirmative as always, he found more than duty in our shared
interest, for we were soon on a basis of disparate equality. Our meetings were
opportunities for both to clarify ideas of the sixteenth century. In fact, he
offered something far better than efficient supervision; he opened windows to
the aer purior, the expanse of intellectuality.
For he talked like an angel. My idea of how
angels might talk derives from Lewis. His prose is brilliant, amusing,
intimate, cogent; but his talk was of a superior order. It combined fluent,
informal progression with the most articulate syntax, as if, somehow, it was a
text remembered – and remembered perfectly. The steps of his argument
succeeded without faltering, with each quotation in the original tongue, well
pronounced. (To keep up his half‑dozen languages he belonged to reading groups
– J. R. R. Tolkien’s Kolbitar for Norse, the Dante Society for Italian, another
group for Homeric Greek.) Add an extraordinary memory, and you can see how any
situation was for him accompanied by a full-voiced choir of verbal
associations. “Probably no reader,” he writes, “comes upon Lydgate’s ‘I herd
other crie’ without recalling ‘the voces vagitus et ingens in Virgil’s
hell.’” For this assumption, Lewis has been called “bookish” – a dumbed‑down
response. Of course he was bookish; hang it, he tutored in literature. Even
standing on the high end of a punt in a one‑piece swimming costume with a
single shoulderstrap, about to dive, he had time for a quotation, half‑heard
over the water, something about silvestrem. Was he teasing me for
reclining at ease in my punt – tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi /
silvestrem ... musam? His allusions, not remotely elitist, were to
familiar passages. In those days you were expected to recognize Aeneid
book 6 or the opening of Virgil’s First Eclogue. Similarly with Old English:
Lewis had pages by heart but mostly stuck to the high points: Thas overeode,
thisses swa maeg, or Hige sceal the heardra.
Lewis’s marshaling of knowledge might have been
overwhelming if it had not been such fun. Here was someone who loved literature
as much as I did, but knew the auctores and how to draw on them. And he
was no mere conduit of sources but could put ideas in the historical
philosopher’s long perspective. On 26 February 1953, I asked him to explain the
puzzling metaphysical dichotomies between form‑substance and form‑matter. He
defined them at length extempore, soon going beyond my comprehension. Sixteenth‑century
confusions of terms needed more detailed analysis than I was ready for. Yet the
explanation, which he reverted to in his Spenser lectures, was lucidity itself.
Lewis opened such abstractions with an
apparently natural ease. His forthright, single‑minded progressions, although
rapid, were unlike Tolkien’s bubbly effervescence. (I remember Tolkien as a
disconcerting conversationalist; he had a habit of distributing speech between
several quite different strands – botanical and linguistic, say – and keeping
them all in play, as in the entrelacement of a medieval romance, so that
you had to keep track of earlier turns of the conversation.) It would never
have occurred to Lewis to affect finesses of speech in the manner of some dons
of his generation. Not for him the exquisitely offhand sprezzatura of
Lord David Cecil. What Lewis said, however surprising at first, most often came
to seem plainly right. This forthrightness (which sometimes raised southern
English hackles) comes out in his labeling of the sixteenth‑century “Drab”
style. It gave him little pleasure, so he said so.
He had almost no small talk; he was courteous
but dialectical and sometimes combative. Like his model Dr. Johnson, Lewis was
“a very polite man,” Claude Rawson remarks, only in self-ignorance. But I think
he knew his shortcoming well enough. He generally followed the adversarial
system, and not always quietly. Exulting in victory, he argued closely on until
his adversary was crushed or ridiculous. For some reason, this method of
conversation did not win universal popularity. It has been called verbal
bullying; and A. N. Wilson connects it with Lewis’s pleasure in fantasies of
whipping. This connection seems facile. Outward bullying need not imply inner
sadism, and sadistic fantasies may be enjoyed by quiet folk. When he was thirty‑five,
Lewis wrote about his bullying manner to Arthur Greeves in different terms: “a
hardened bigot shouting every one down ... is what I am in danger of becoming.”
By the time I knew him, he usually remembered to avoid bigotry. His contentiousness
was joy in debate; he never bullied me.
As to bullying pupils, the witnesses differ.
Some who knew him well, like George Sayer, remember him as never bullying. My
guess, though, is that a few pupils were bullied, and rightly so. Nowadays, of course,
all students are sober and industrious; and, if not, they have the right to
remain silent in tutorials and idle outside them. Last century things were
different. Faced with blockish inertia or faking of essays or lazy superiority
to work or lack of interest in justifying a place at the university, Lewis may
well have judged a little bullying in order. Unless students worked hard enough
to remember a text, they were unteachable. He did not get on, for example, with
John Betjeman, whom he judged an idle, mischievous social climber. (I was to
fail as badly with Michael Palin, who turned out well in later life but is on
record as having learnt nothing from my tutorials.)
Those who called Lewis bully and brute probably
included some who shrank from discussing matters of substance. The fifties was
a decade of furious exits, slammed doors, demands for “apologies in writing”.
Heavies like Iain Macdonald hectored their juniors unmercifully. I shall not
forget my own fear in case it came out that I had given way to the contemptible
weakness of consulting what Macdonald called a “trick‑cyclist”. Helen Gardner
then had the reputation of liking tutorials to end in tears. I can believe it,
for I heard her at a student society question the speaker so insistently (“Have
you actually read the novel? Have you read the last chapter? Are you
trying to tell us that...”) that the woman under interrogation broke down.
Fierce duels like this doubtless helped to maintain academic standards; it was
dangerous not to know the text. But Lewis was not given to ferocity of that
sort.
Often enough, though, he had to defend himself
against Oxford’s anti‑Christian orthodoxy. One of these “humanists,” H. W.
Garrod the Keats editor, knew how to welcome a guest to Merton: “Ah, Lewis.
Aren’t you the man who thinks the Holy Ghost has balls?” – not the gentlest way
to remind anyone of the Athanasian Creed. Lewis’s challenges were less rudely
ad hominem, but sometimes sharp enough. When one graduate pupil brought a poor
essay, Lewis is said to have torn it silently into the wastebasket. A
devastatingly impersonal learning experience. Lewis didn’t always know when he
hurt. To me, he was more amiable; he would enjoy the escape from repetitive
undergraduate tutorials. These cost him much energy – some of it probably going
to hide a long-accumulated dislike of tutoring uncongenial pupils in
disagreeable subjects outside the English School. Anyway, we got on well; Lewis
seemed always on the verge of hilarity – between a chuckle and a roar.
Very occasionally, we had disagreements. One of
them concerned Charles Darwin; Lewis saw the theory of natural selection as
threatening religion. My education had been on the science side, leading to a
year in medicine at Glasgow University; I thought I knew quite a bit about
genetics. Probing my views on evolution, Lewis rehearsed an argument from
Philip Gosse’s ill-fated Omphalos. “You talk about fossils. How do you
know God didn’t put the fossils in the rocks?” Lewis would assume I had read
enough Gosse to see the wit of using the Victorian’s subtle compromise to test
the crude positivism of modern science. Or maybe he was trying out the old
argument as one might casually heft an ancient but still serviceable mace.
Anyhow, I was furious. How could he ignore the evidence of the geological
record? Or was that a plant, too? Did God often lie to us? And so on. I grew as
red as Lewis himself. But he nimbly reined in, avoiding the threatened
collision; he never lost his temper in debate.
Full of my “liberal” assurance that there could
be no conflict between religion and science, I dismissed Lewis’s question as
willful obscurantism. If he was determined to set religion against Darwin,
surely he could have found a better argument. He might have gone to the De
Genesi, say, for Augustine’s doctrine of gradually ripening seeds of
creation. Many years later, when I read Omphalos, I was ashamed to find
that Gosse had anticipated exactly the objections I made to Lewis in my
ignorance. Gosse is sometimes misrepresented as arguing that fossils were
inserted to test faith, whereas in fact he revered the fossil record as
revealing, without deception, God’s laws of biological development. To
reconcile this with biblical chronology, Gosse speculated that fossils “may
possibly belong to a prochronic development of the mighty plan of the life‑history
of the world.” Lewis must have realized I didn’t know Omphalos, and
could have crushed my argument by pointing this out; but the “bully” was too
kindly for that. After my outburst I was less in awe of Lewis; his opposition
to Darwin came over as simplistic. More recently, I have begun to see that
evolution is more complex than it seemed then. All the same, I still think
Lewis failed to enter the world of modern science, probably through not grasping
its mathematical character. He had so little grasp of mathematics that he could
never pass the elementary algebra in Responsions, the Oxford entrance exam.
When I wrote Lewis in 1961 about interesting ideas
in Teilhard de Chardin, Lewis replied accusing me, at least half seriously, of
“biolatry”: “You talk of Evolution as if it were a substance (like individual
organisms) and even a rational substance or person. I had thought it was an
abstract noun.” He conceded “there might be a sort of daemon ... in the
evolutionary process. But that view must surely be argued on its own merits?”
Well, Teilhard had done just that; so it looked as if Lewis had not read The
Phenomenon of Man. Then it dawned on me that Lewis was not much interested
in science. He had read Greats and like many philosophers – Richard Rorty is a
recent instance – was content with general ideas about the philosophical errors
of scientists. About the actual character of scientific thought, Lewis knew
very little; he had painted himself out of the scientific world picture.
Jenny and I rented an attic at 2 Church Walk in
North Oxford, the same house where the Spenserian Rudolf Gottfried stayed. From
there I cycled to Magdalen for supervisions. Often Major Lewis sat typing in
the large sitting room and directed me through to his brother in the smaller
room. One winter morning I got there frozen; Lewis, wearing a dressing gown
over his clothes, was engrossed in Astounding Science Fiction. Conversation
turned to fantasy; I confessed I was trying to write one, myself, and had got
blocked. He made me describe the setting (a paraworld with a slower time‑lapse),
then said, “You need two things for this sort of fiction. The first you already
have: a world, a mise en scène. But you also need a mythos or plot.”
After that, Lewis was always keener to know how The Rest of Time was
coming along than to read the next installment of dissertation. This was
gratifying, of course, yet somehow depressing to a would‑be academic author.
But it was an article of faith with Lewis that writing fiction could never
conflict with studying literature. Not that he always wrote without difficulty;
sometimes he had to set a project aside for a long period. He showed me several
unfinished or abandoned pieces (his notion of supervision included exchanging
work in progress); these included “After Ten Years,” The Dark Tower, and
Till We Have Faces. Another fragment, a time‑travel story, had been
aborted after only a few pages. Getting to the “other” world was a particular
problem, he said; he had given up several stories at that stage. His
unfamiliarity with scientific discourse may have played a part in this. The
vehicles of transition in Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra,
although suggestive in other ways, are hardly plausible as scientific
apparatus. In the Narnia stories Lewis turned to magical means of entry:
teleportation rings from E. Nesbit and Tolkien, or else a terribly strange
wardrobe.
Once fully
started, Lewis quickly wrote a more or less final version, like Anthony
Trollope. Unlike Henry James (or Tolkien), he never drafted and redrafted.
Nevill Coghill might have to make ten or more drafts of anything for
publication; but when things went well Lewis would write only a rough copy and
a fair copy (with one or two corrections per page). And that was it, except for
scholarly books like the OHEL volume, which were tried out first as
lectures. Even the final version would be in longhand; Lewis thought a noisy
typewriter dulled the sense of rhythm. Fortunately, his writing was legible
enough to go straight to the publisher, unless Warren typed it out. Obviously,
composition was not so fast as writing; before committing to paper, he must
have composed each work in his head, retaining it by some “power of memory” (as
Tolkien called Lewis’s retentiveness of the spoken word). Lewis’s fluency
suggests that he composed in paragraphs, as Robert Louis Stevenson did, and
Edward Gibbon in his covered acacia walk. Others of Lewis’s generation
similarly revolved ideas while walking; the rhythm assisting them, perhaps, to
develop expansive themes. Erwin Panofsky wrote much art history in Princeton’s
woods, returning from a walk with paragraphs finished to the last full stop. He
recited installments to a friend who noticed, after a break due to illness,
that Panofsky had lost his place and was repeating, word for word, a passage
already imparted. And he was not only word perfect but punctuation perfect.
The flow of
Lewis’s writing and speaking had much to do with this remarkable memory. Memory
feats were common enough in Oxford then, especially among classicists. Edgar
Lobe the papyrologist and fungiphage, to mention one, modestly denied having
Homer by heart – but added, “Mind you, if you said a verse I dare say I could
give you the next one.” Lewis could have claimed much the same of Paradise
Lost. Kenneth Tynan, whom Lewis tutored, tells of a memory game. Tynan had
to choose a number from one to forty, for the shelf in Lewis’s library; a
number from one to twenty, for the place in this shelf; from one to a hundred,
for the page; and from one to twenty-five for the line, which he read aloud.
Lewis had then to identify the book and say what the page was about. I can
believe this, having seen how rapidly he found passages in his complete Rudyard
Kipling or his William Morris. Tynan’s anecdote usefully suggests the sort of
memory involved; not memory by rote (although Lewis had plenty of that) but
something more like the Renaissance ars memorativa, depending on
“places” in texts. It was not principally memoria ad verba but rather ad
res – memory of the substance, aimed at grasp of contents through their
structure. Lewis’s annotations of his own books show him continually charting
formal structures and divisions of the work. When he offers himself in De
Descriptione Temporum as a specimen of “Old Western culture”, he could have
validated this on the basis of memory alone. But we ignored him; and now that
detailed knowledge of texts is neither pursued nor examined, an essential
method of cultivating and testing literary competence has been abandoned.
Endowed with
such a memory, one might expect Lewis to have lectured extempore, as he was
perfectly capable of doing (and did, in the informal situation of the Socratic
Society). But the lecture notes for his Cambridge Spenser lectures reflect a
more complicated procedure, which may have had something to do with his habit
of using successive lecture series to work up material for a book. In these notes,
quotations are written out in full – even passages one might expect Lewis to
have had by heart. These would serve as memory prompts, and to indicate where
the script was to take over from improvisation. For the main body of the
lecture, by contrast, only a skeletal argument is provided; a sequence of
logical divisions and conclusions. Each element has its letter, almost as in
formal logic: “Simplicity A ... Sophistication A. ... Simplicity B ...
Sophistication B”; or
a.
B[ritomart] > < Radigund
b. B[ritomart]
– Artegall relation < > Radigund Artegall relation.
Sometimes the manuscript signalizes the
“lead-in” to some joke or coup d’amphithéatre. These were prepared for
long in advance; as Derek Brewer puts it, “the fuse might be lit several minutes
before the actual, yet unexpected, explosion.” Altogether, the lecture notes
are no more (and no less) than aides-mémoires for trains of thought serving as
armatures for his improvisations. However closely logical the progressions
might be, their rhetoric was conversational, albeit with a certain dramatic
heightening. I heard part of the “Prolegomena to Renaissance Literature” series
(drawn from his 1944 Clark Lectures and already written OHEL volume, and
trying out for The Discarded Image); my impression was of avuncular
informality. At times, “Uncle Lewis” seemed hardly to be performing but rather
exploring a thought for the first time. And, so far was he from standing on
ceremony or authority or superior learning that he started his lecture as he came
through the door and finished it as he walked out. He was a popular and (not at
all the same thing) good lecturer – lecturing sometimes to an audience
of three hundred or more. He towered above his colleagues in the English
faculty – at a time, admittedly, when lecturing standards were not high. His
resonant voice suited the rostrum; he was always easily audible (something that
could not be said of Tolkien).
Lewis’s innate memorial powers were developed by
education, first at school and then with his private tutor William Kirkpatrick.
At Oxford they were strengthened by having to depend on the Bodleian Library
rather than on his own books. In the 1940s, Lewis’s personal library struck
Brewer as meager. Later, when he bought more largely and accumulated about
three thousand books (still not large by modern standards), his reading habits
had become ingrained, and he continued to rely on memory. Often he used books
almost in the medieval way, as memory prompts.
Literary
memory depends on use: it must be frequently refreshed. Even a “photographic”
memory like Frank Harris’s needs refreshment, to keep out “creative” errors.
Lewis had almost total recall of words (he remembered new vocabulary after once
looking it up in the dictionary), yet he had to go over texts frequently –
sometimes immediately before a tutorial. Consequently his reading and
re-reading were astonishingly copious. Reading habits, of course, were
different in the fifties; I used then to read ten hours a day. Lewis, who read
far faster, read with surer grasp, and read whenever commitments allowed – read
even at mealtimes – read prodigiously. He kept a record, to know when a text
needed re-reading (unless it was a case of “never again!”). Some quite minor
authors were re-read. A copy of the Worm Ouroboros he lent me was
inscribed “Read for the first time... read for the second... for the fifth
time,” with dates. And E. R. Eddison was neither a canonical author nor a
person Lewis found very congenial.
Lewis
managed to cram copious reading into his busy life by not making a task of it.
He told his pupils, “The great thing is to be always reading but never to get
bored – treat it not like work, more as a vice!” Following his own advice, he
pursued congenial literature with passion (pleasure is too weak a word). As for
uncongenial works, a few minutes a day would get him through. His tastes became
more catholic with maturity (he reached out latterly even to drama); but he
always read selectively rather than systematically. If a major work like Abraham
Cowley’s Davideis bored him, he set it aside. What he read, however, he
read more deeply than most. He led me to see that coverage – complete knowledge
of literature – can never be attained. Rising from a thirst to range over it
and take in all that is delightful, good reading has to work by sampling,
exploring, and at last grasping strategic works or passages, in the context of
sources, analogues, historical circumstances, and the inferior subliterature
whose lower pleasures it leaves behind. Lewis’s selectivity showed in the works
he had chosen to remember. Being fairly political then, I thought of William
Morris as the author of News from Nowhere; but Lewis preferred The
Well at the World’s End (and persuaded me to read it). He made a good deal
of room for reading simply by missing out newspapers – at the cost of being
amazingly ignorant of current affairs. That shocked me; I had been taught that
reading the papers was a duty, next after the Bible. I had yet to discover the
revulsion from politics that Lewis had formed as a consequence of early
memories of politically religious hatred in Ireland.
Lewis’s
choice of reading differed from that of mainstream literary critics of his time
like F. R. Leavis of Wallace Robson. Lewis took a longer view; he knew the
official canon was prone to change, and so was happy to study authors outside
it. The private canon he held in memory featured Spenser, Pope, Sir Walter
Scott, Jane Austen, John Keats, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins (rather
than William Thackeray). George Meredith’s Egoist he re-read every year.
Robert Lewis Stevenson, John Ruskin, and Kipling (extracanonical then) were
important to him personally. Influential models included Dr. Johnson and, in
another way, George MacDonald. On the whole, a romantic emphasis. He went to
Walter de la Mare and Robert Graves, even to Roy Campbell, for alternatives to
modernism. He kept up with the modernists (and could quote from them) but
rejected their intense introspection. Early T. S. Eliot he particularly disliked;
and he read Henry James’s letters for the first time in his middle fifties. He
had even less interest in the movement writers Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis.
When Amis introduced himself, on the Belfast ferry, he received what he took
(perhaps wrongly) as a putdown: “Amice? Amice? No, I don’t believe I know the
name.” That would cause chagrin, for Amis admired Lewis’s lecturing . (Lewis
lectured fairly slowly, and Amis, who despised students, exaggerated this; he
lectured at dictation speed, “so you can get it all down.”)
I don’t mean
that Lewis closed his mind to all contemporary literature or new methods of
criticism. On the contrary, he valued Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and George
Orwell very highly. And he even said he envied my generation our chance to work
out the details of older literature. This was apropos of Kent Hieatt’s work on
Spenser’s Epithalamion; Lewis read Short Time’s Endless Monument
for Columbia University Press and sent me a page proof as soon as it was
published. Supervisor or ex-supervisor made no difference; Lewis always
remembered to pass on new scholarship that might be relevant. He sent the
Hieatt on 22 November 1960, and soon after his own review of Robert Ellrodt’s Neoplatonism
in the Poetry of Spenser, before its publication in Études Anglaises.
We also exchanged less academic books: he made me aware of David Lindsay’s Voyage
to Arcturus, and I responded, less successfully, with Austin Wright’s Islandia.
A corollary
of Lewis’s memory art was that his reading, prodigious as it was, had gaps and
limits. He certainly read less widely than F. W. Bateson, the last Oxford don
to keep up with all the journals. Lewis’s understanding of contemporary
philosophy was inadequate, as a famous debate with Miss Anscombe painfully exposed.
His theology was almost exclusively biblical, rather than “systematic” or
“dogmatic”. And he had little interest in the visual arts – unlike his friend
Nevill Coghill, for example, or John Bryson his rival for the Magdalen
fellowship, both connoisseurs. Only belatedly, when Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind,
and Mario Praz influenced the study of literature as well as of art, did Lewis
develop an interest in iconography. Even in reading for his OHEL volume,
Lewis followed individual predilections. He suffered criticism for his
unfavorable account of the humanists – due perhaps to insufficient knowledge of
the northern humanists.
Perhaps
Lewis’s most striking limitations was his lack of interest in literary
criticism as distinct from literature. In the fifties, New Criticism and
structuralism were only beginning to reach Oxford; Theory appeared no more than
a harmless little cloud on the horizon. Intelligent academics could see that
the new theories depended on false premises and assumed they would come to nothing.
Lewis certainly knew the need to study context and could have opposed
neo-Saussureanism effectively; but instead he ignored it and left Bateson to
sketch a theory of contextualism. Unconcerned with phenomenology, Lewis
regarded criticism simply as a report on reading. So he went on exploring his
impressions, clarifying them and determining the properties of individual
works. Would theory have helped with this? Without it, he often went right to
the heart of what others called critical issues. Like most Oxford dons, Lewis
thought F. R. Leavis’s narrow moralism more of a threat. In Lewis’s view (and I
agreed), to study only an approved canon was to evade literature’s challenges.
Literature did not merely confirm one’s views but might surprise by embodying
perspectives that could qualify reader’s prejudices and widen their horizons.
The range of
literature that Lewis held in memory was affected by the formal limitations of
the Oxford English School, whose canon then ended at 1830. In the syllabus
debate of the fifties, Lewis defended this arrangement against the proposal of
Helen Gardner and others to extend the canon to 1900 or later. Although this
would have taken in many of his favorite authors, Lewis argued against it. The
proposed field would be unworkably extensive, making preparation more
superficial and tending to what we now call “dumbing down”. At that time I
favored extending the curriculum; but I have since come to repent this. In the
event, “reform” brought a radical lurch, and gave the Oxford School, like many
others, a disastrously modern focus. Modern literature has proved unsuitable
for undergraduate study. It is not far enough removed from our shared
assumptions to challenge them. It has yet to prove itself as the memory of our
history. And mostly it is not memorable. Besides, the reference books required
for studying it are not yet available.
If Lewis’s memory of literature was somewhat
idiosyncratic, this hardly affected his supervising. For he conceived the role,
not as that of manager, still less as authoritative Doktorvater, but
rather as that of disputant, like his own Kirkpatrick. The disputations might
be designed (as on the Gosse occasion) to force clearer formulation or
self-defense or discovery of hidden assumptions. What, for example, did I think
thinking was? “How often, Fowler, do you suppose yourself to be actually
thinking?” I was about to claim, absurdly, that I spent most of my waking life
thinking, when he broke in to confess that he himself thought only about once a
week – twice, in a good week. The term “thinking” was to be kept for inference
from ground to consequent. Another time he amiably ruminated, “you know,
Fowler, you don’t have enough roughage in your life.” This must have
been projection; I’ve never known anyone who organized his life more than Lewis
himself.
Similarly
out of the blue, he proposed to dispute what life’s greatest pleasure was.
Great art? No. Mystical ecstasy? No: something more generally accessible.
Simultaneous orgasm? But that wasn’t it either. “I’ll tell you,” he said; it’s
the pleasure, after walking for hours, of coming to a pub and relieving
yourself.” Probably I had been too solemn, or high-flown. But his down-to-earth
example was not chosen at random. He would sometimes in the middle of a
supervision go off to the next room and pee into a chamber pot, apologizing for
his “weak bladder” and maintaining the flow of discourse through the open door.
(Oxford was still very much a male society; senior common rooms might have
chamber pots behind screens, and one of the Inklings was known to conduct
tutorials from his bath.) Outside the teaching frame, Lewis was hardly less
disputatious. When we had him to dinner at Church Walk, conversation turned to
hot-cross buns and Jenny faulted the local variety for its paucity of raisins
and spices. At once Lewis pounced; the traditional hot-cross buns had neither
fruit nor spice. It was made, was it not, with the last of the unleavened
bread?
Naturally,
the challenges were most often literary. When Lewis praised Samuel Henry
Butcher and Andrew Lang’s translation of Homer, I said something in favor of T.
E. Lawrence’s Odyssey. Instantly, Lewis rubbished it, chuckling: “But the
style’s Wardour Street, isn’t it?” – one of his favorite dismissive epithets. He
thought my approval too vague and wanted to maneuver me into substantiating it.
We settled, I think, for Lawrence’s handling the narrative lucidly. Sometimes
Lewis would take up the evidential basis of a point, giving me en passant a
crash course in rhetoric. “Don’t exaggerate claims beyond what the evidence
will easily bear,” he advised; the weaker the statement, the stronger the
case.” Or “Make your statements only as strong as you have to.” I had a
propensity to overstate – an un-English tendency Lewis himself displayed, as at
the English faculty meeting when he foolhardily told Helen Gardner that all his
pupils read Calvin.
In 1955 Lewis went off to Cambridge to take up
the chair of medieval and Renaissance English. Never forgetting a pupil, he
passed me on to his own former tutor, F. P. Wilson, Merton Professor, compiler
of the Oxford Book of Proverbs and an authority on Elizabethan and
Jacobean prose. Wilson was a very different supervisor: less the bold critic,
more the professional scholar. He knew just what shape a dissertation should
have; and his gentle suggestions, quietly put, were so clearly right as to
render argument superfluous. But no single supervisor could supply Lewis’s
place. Soon I found unofficial mentors: Helen Gardner, the learned Ethel
Seaton, Batson of the Cambridge Bibliography, J. B. Leishman, and George
Temple the mathematician. Besides these I could rely, of course, on my peer
group; for we all mysteriously had time then for coffee in the morning and in
the afternoon tea – Ian Gregor and Mark Kinkead-Weekes, the satirical rogue
Claude Rawson and the laid-back Walt Litz, and sometimes George Hunter or
Christopher Ricks.
During Lewis’s
Cambridge years I saw little of him, and by 1962 we were different people. I
had finished my D. Phil., been a junior research fellow at Queen’s, taught a
year in Indiana, and become a fellow of Brasenose. Lewis, too was a different
person from the supervisor I remembered: he had married but lost his wife and
was himself seriously ill. Visiting him in the Acland hospital and at the
Kilns, I got to know him as a friend. Now our talk, more recollective and
ruminative, was about anything and everything: his dreams, plum jam, The
Lord of the Rings. On his side at least, it seemed without reserve. The
sort of topic he proposed now was whether the pleasures of masturbation were
keener than those of full intercourse. In the United States, I heard of a Lewis
quite distinct from the Lewis I knew. My Lewis smoked incessantly, drank more
than was altogether good for him, and appreciated bawdy, whether of the Rodiad
or the Eskimo Nell genre. If he was a saint, it was not one of an
austere or narrowly pious sort. Nor given to angst. He was assured, and talked
of his wife, Joy, without difficulty. Retrospection now brought no unbearable
sadness.
In 1963 Jack
died, and with him much else. He had been laughed at for offering himself as a
specimen of Old Western culture. But he proved in actuality to be one of the
last of a threatened species. Before he died, he wrote, optimistically, of the
tide turning back to literature. In the event, N.I.C.E. turned out to have more
subsidiaries, on both sides of the Atlantic, than he ever feared. Universities
submitted to bureaucratic management, dons morphed into accountants, training
replaced education, and Theory displaced literature. Reading simplistic codes,
supplying false contexts, pursuing irrelevant indeterminacies or tell-tale
“gaps”: these have proved no substitute for the memorial grasp of literature.
Now that the tide really seems on the turn after its fifty-year ebb, we could
do a great deal worse than look back across the drift to the great reader
Lewis. We need to try to recall what literature was; what it meant, and can
still mean, to grasp literary works in memory.