Carpe Cakem!

One of the Inklings was Hugo Dyson, a Shakespeare expert. Of all the members, he was probably the most interested in just hanging out and having a good time. He is reported to have moaned “Oh God, no more Elves” whenever Tolkien would pull out another draft chapter from The Lord of the Rings. I found this annecdotal story about him to be a crackup:

Hugo Dyson, on his visits to Oxford from Reading, became a frequent and most welcome interrupter of Warnie Lewis’s ornings: ‘At about half past eleven when I was at work in the front room in College, in burst Dyson in his most exuberant mood. He began by saying that it was such a cold morning that we would have to adjourn almost immediately to get some brandy. I pointed out to him that if he was prepared to accept whiskey as an alternative, it was available in the room. Having sniffed it he observed “it would be unpardonable rudeness to your brother to leave any of this” and emptied the remains of the decanter into the class. After talking very loudly and amusingly for some quarter of an hour, he remarked airily “I suppose we can’t be heard in the next room?” then having listened for a moment, “Oh, it’s all right, it’s the pupil talking – your brother won’t want to listen to him anyway”. He next persuaded me to walk round to Blackwell’s with him and here he was the centre of attraction to a crowd of undergraduates. Walking up to the counter he said: “I want a second hand so-and-so’s Shakespeare; have you got one?” The assistant: “Not a second hand one sir, I’m afraid.” Dyson (impatiently): “Well, take a copy and rubn it on the floor, and sell it to me as shop soiled!.” ‘

-The diary of Warnie Lewis, 2/18/1933. (Inklings p.54)

Tolkien was on one hand, delighted that his close friend Lewis had become a Christian. But he couldn’t get too excited because Lewis chose to join the church of England, with which Tolkien had a very bad experience with as a child.

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic. He had hooped that Lewis too might become a Catholic, and he was disappointed that he had returned to membership of the Church of England (the equivalent of the Church of Ireland in which Lewis had been baptised [as a child].) Tolkien was strongly unsympathetic towards the Church of England, not least because during his childhood his own mother, a Catholic convert, had been treated harshly by relatives who belonged to it – indeed he believed that this ‘persecution’ had hastened her death. As a result he was particularly sunsitive to any shade of anti-Catholic prejudice.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.51

I only discovered years later that there was a lot to appreciate in the reformed faith. I was turned off from it because at 17, during my first month in college, a bible study I attended was crashed by some cage-phase Calvinists jerks. Bummer.

Tolkien was Catholic. Lewis was Anglican. Neither of them gave much credence to Calvinism. Part of it shows right here I think. Their own philosophy about the value and beauty of myth-making and storytelling does not jive with the doctrine of total depravity, at least, not with a lot of qualifications.

Tolkien said, man is not ultimately a liar. He may pervert his throughts ito lies, but he comes from God, and it is from God that he draws his ultimate ideals. Lewis agreed: he had, indeed, accepted something like this notion for many years. Therefore, Tolkien continued, not merely the abstract thoughts of man but also his imaginative inventions must originate with God, and must in consequence reflect something of eternal truth. I making a myth, in practising ‘mythopoeia’ and peopleing the world with elves and dragons and goblins, a storyteller, or ‘sub-creator’ as Tolkien liked to call such a person, is actually fulfilling God’s purpose, and reflecting a splintered fragment of the true light.  Pagan myths are therefore never just ‘lies’: there is always something of the truth in them.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.43

The phrase “paradigm shift” is utterly overused and has lost most of it’s force. There really is such a thing though. What does it look like?

Both C.S. Lewis and Tolkien were greatly influenced by Owen Barfield’s thoughts on the “abstract” and “literal” with regards to mythology. (This would take along time to explain here.) It appeared in a book he wrote called Poetic Diction, though other people had been developing the idea as well.

Not long after the book’s publication, Lewis reported to Barfield: ‘You might like to know that when Tolkien dined with me the other night he said a propos of something quite different that your conception of the ancient semantic unity had modified his whole outlook and that he hwas always just going to say something in a lecture when your conception stopped him in time. “It’s one of those things,” he said “that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”

So it was that by 1931 Lewis had come to understand that mythology has an important position in the history of thinking. It was a realisation that helped him across his last philosophical hurdle [to accepting Christianity].

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.42

That’s the phrase I like the most: “It’s one of those things that when you’ve once seen it there are all sorts of things you can never say again.”

This is exactly what I felt after reading Rene Girard. There are just some silly ideas about history and sociology that you can never say again with a straight face.

Experiences change people’s minds all the time. For example, spending a year serving among the impoverished in a foreign country will change your perception of the poor. I’ve never done this myself, but it seems like it would. Being married for 10 years changes your thinking about a lot of things, but it’s rather gradual.

Most people’s conversions to Christianity are a gradual combination of many things, even if part of it could be described in this way.

The change I’m talking about here is much faster. It comes from maybe just 1 hour of reading an incredible, special piece of reasoning. How do you describe that?

I think rather than opening your mouth, to tell everyone about your exciting new discovery, it humbles and closes your mouth, at least for a time. There are some things you can just never say again.

I love this story about how C.S. Lewis’s desire to be a good teacher prevented him from resting in a generic theism. It helped to “force” him rationally into something, which was eventually Christianity.

As long ago as 1920, his study of philosphy had led him ‘to postulate some sort of God as the least objectionable theory’, though he added, ‘of course we KNOW nothing’. The notion of an ultimate truth made sense to him because, as he remarked in 1924 when commenting on Bertrand Russell’s free-thinking idealism, ‘our ideas are after all a natural product’, and there must be some objective standard, some ultimate fact to explain them.

On the other hand, ‘God’ still seemed a crude and nursery-like word, and for several years Lewis used other terms to describe his notion of fundamental truth. During this time he was, like most othose who studied philosophy at Oxford in the early nineteen-twenties, still accepting the work of Hegel and his disciples, and as a result he chose Hegelian expressions such as ‘the Absolute Mind’ or just ‘the Absolute’.

But when he spent the year 1924-5 teaching Philosphy at University College he discovered that this “watered Hegelianism’ was inadequate for tutorial purposes. The notion of an unspecified Abolute simply could not be made clear to his pupils. So he resorted to referring to fundamental truth as ‘the Spirit’, distinguishing this (though not really explaining how) from ‘the God of popular religion’, and emphasising that there was no possibility of being in a personal relationship with this Spirit…

It was finally in 1929 that he first knelt and prayed to this God.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.41

[J.R.R. Tolkien’s] roots were buried deep in early literature, and the major names in twentieth-century writing meant little or nothing to him He read very little modern fiction, and took no serious notice of it.

Lewis read much more wiedely than Tolkien among modern writers [T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, W.H. Auden, James Joyce, E.M. Forster, and on and on…]

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.158

Tolkien knew what he liked and he studied it to the max. Lewis explored everything.

It’s the classic specialist versus jack (and incidentally “Jack” in this case!) situation.

It’s the fox and the hedgehog yet again.

C.S. Lewis became known initially for his Romantic scholarship and literary criticism. Then he became famous throughout the Christian world for his theology writings. Then he turned around and became one of the greatest author’s of children’s fiction.

It’s easy to see that why some of his Oxford colleges resented him. It’s the same reason people were pissed of at Leonard Bernstien for being a master pianist, AND a master composer, AND a master orchestra conductor.

Tolkien, on the other hand, was a hedgehog. He did one thing really well and paid little attention to any other discipline. He knew old English and norse languages inside and out. He labored since his teen years on his great mythology of Middle Earth. The Lord of the Rings was his masterpiece, 12 years in the making. Lewis wrote three of his Narnia books in one year.

I think though, that after 60 years, it is clear that Tolkien’s legacy is greater. That’s what you get for being the hedgehog.

C.S. Lewis and nearly all the rest of his Christian friends liked to drink a lot of beer. With the publishing of The Screwtape Letters, Lewis, who had been previously only known in small literature circles quickly became well known in churches across Britain and especially America. He started to get a lot of fan mail. Along with these came letters criticizing him for daring to follow Jesus AND still drink beer. The horror! He replied:

“I strongly object to the tyrannic and unstripctureal insolence of anything that calls itself a CHurch and makes teetotalism a condition of membership. Apart from the more serious objection (that Our Lord Himself turned water into wine and made wine the medium of the only rite He imposed on all His followers), it is so provincial (what I believe you people call ‘small town’).’

-from the Letters of C.S. Lewis, p. 262 (Inklings p.185)

My dream, my favorite way to spend a day is to hang out in a nice cafe all day reading good books at sipping fine espresso.

I grab fleeting hours of this arrangement when I can throughout a regular week, usually in the early hours of the morning.

It was with much delight that I spent the whole of today (work was cancelled due to Presiden’t Day) in such a state. Marvelous! I read much of the biography on the Inklings (which was quite interesting) and will be posting my notes here over the next couple of days. This one here is fitting for today:

[After the war] the company made plans to celebrate peace. ‘The Inklings have already agreed’, Tolkien told his son Christopher, ‘that their victory celebration, if they are spared to have one, will be to take a whole inn in the countryside for at least a week, and spend it entirely in beer and talk, without reference to any clock!’

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.199

Many, many thanks to my sweet wife.

Photo credit

Several biographer’s and critics claim that C.S. Lewis’s very best book was Till We Have Faces.

He himself throught so, preferring it even to his earlier favourite, Perelandra. Ironically it had a poorer reception than any other story he had written.

-Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings, p.245

Beethoven was in a similar situation. His seventh symphony was very popular, but his eighth was not so warmly received. When asked why that was, he replied, “Because it’s better!”

Posturing

Because of endless pride
Reborn with endless error,
Each hour I look aside
Upon my secret mirror
Trying all postures there
To make my image fair.

-C.S. Lewis, Poems, p.89 (Inklings p.244)