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.