C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ – was J.R.R. Tolkien, six years his senior, who had just been elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. They met at the English Faculty meeting at Merton College on 11 May 1926. ‘He is a smooth, pale, fluent little chap,’ wrote Lewis in his diary, ‘can’t read Spenser because of the forms – thinks language is the real thing in the school – thinks all literature is written for the amusement of men between thirty and forty – we ought to vote ourselves out of existence if we were honest – still the sound-changes and the gobbets are great fun for the dons. No harm in him: only needs a smack or so.’³¹

In the Michaelmas Term of 1926 Tolkien founded the Kolbítar, an informal club for dons who met for the purpose of reading the Icelandic sagas and myths in the original Old Icelandic and Old Norse. Lewis joined the club and whatever initial antipathy they may have felt was soon forgotten. It was not long before they were meeting in each other’s rooms and talking far into the night. ‘Tolkien came back with me to college and sat discoursing of the gods and giants and Asgard for three hours’ is a typical note, from a letter to Arthur Greeves on 3 December 1929.³²

During 1926 Lewis was still much concerned with poetry. Dymer was at last completed, and accepted by J.M. Dent & Sons in May, being published on 20 September. Before its appearance he was showing some interest in the contemporary poetry, siding with Abercrombie^* and the ‘Georgians’ against Eliot^† and the ‘Moderns’. Perhaps piqued at his failure to get any of his own poems accepted, he hatched the idea of a ‘literary dragonade: a series of mock Eliotic poems to be sent up to the Dial and the Criterion until sooner or later one of these filthy editors falls into the trap’.³³

Coghill and W.F.R. Hardie, and his pupil Henry Yorke,^* joined in the scheme – but it does not seem to have gone very far. The American literary critic and philosopher Paul Elmer More (1864–1937) was in Oxford in the spring of 1933 and met Lewis shortly after The Pilgrim’s Regress was published. More was a close friend of T.S. Eliot, and liked his poetry. Even so, Lewis got on well with More and in his letter to him of 23 May 1935 Lewis explained exactly what he thought wrong with Eliot’s poetry:

There may be many reasons why you do not share my dislike of Eliot, but I hardly know why you should be surprised at it. On p. 143 of the article on Joyce you yourself refer to him as ‘a great genius expending itself on the propagation of irresponsibility’. To me the ‘great genius’ is not apparent: the other thing is. Surely it is natural that I should regard Eliot’s work as a very great evil. He is the very spearhead of that attack on πéραζ^† which you deplore. His constant profession of humanism and his claim to be ‘classicist’ may not be consciously insincere, but they are erroneous. The plea that his poems of disintegration are all satiric, are intended as awful warnings, is the common plea of all these literary traitors to humanity. So Juvenal, Wycherley, Byron excuse their pornography: so Eliot himself excuses Joyce. His intention only God knows: I must be content to judge his work by its fruits, and I contend that no man is fortified against chaos by reading the Waste Land, but that most men are by it infected with chaos. The opposite plea rests on a very elementary confusion between poetry that represents disintegration and disintegrated poetry. The Inferno is not infernal poetry: the Waste Land is. His criticism tells the same tale. He may say he is a classicist, but his sympathy with depraved poets (Marlowe, Johnson, Webster) is apparent: but he shows no real love of any disciplined and magnanimous writer save Dante. Of Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Milton, Racine he has nothing to say. Assuredly he is one of the enemy: and all the more dangerous because he is sometimes disguised as a friend. And this offence is exaggerated by attendant circumstances, such as his arrogance. And (you will forgive me) it is further aggravated for an Englishman by the recollection that Eliot stole upon us, a foreigner and a neutral, while we were at war – obtained, I have my wonders how, a job in the Bank of England – and became (am I wrong) the advance guard of the invasion since carried out by his natural friends and allies, the Steins and Pounds and hoc genus omne, the Parisian riff-raff of denationalized Irishmen and Americans who have perhaps given Western Europe her death wound.³⁴

      It took Lewis many years to come to terms with ‘modern’ poetry. Though he never accepted it as equal in value to the best of the traditional variety, he came to recognize the greatness of some of its exponents and numbered Eliot and Auden among his personal friends. His favourite contemporary poets, however, seem to have been Charles Williams, Roy Campbell and Kathleen Raine – perhaps he inclined to be over-partial to the poetry when he liked the poet. He never lost his respect for Masefield and the best of the Georgians, whom he would quote, praise and defend when occasion called – though he would allow few virtues to Noyes, perhaps on account of his own dislike for ‘elfin’ poetry, even if written by Herrick or Drayton.

He was reading the proofs of Dymer at this time and feeling an author’s usual sensation of failure and disappointment when it is too late to rewrite or revise. ‘I never liked it less,’ he confessed, ‘I felt that no mortal could get any notion of what the devil it was all about. I am afraid this sort of stuff is very much hit or miss, yet I think it is my only real line.’³⁵

Dymer was published on 20 September 1926. That it was a miss was not, however, the opinion of the more discerning reviewers. ‘Mr Clive Hamilton’s long allegorical poem Dymer is executed with a consistent craftsmanship which excites admiration even where criticism is readiest to speak,’ wrote Dilys Powell in the Sunday Times on 19 September; and after picking out several ‘felicitous phrases’ she assured the reader that ‘the tediousness which is so often the chief feature of allegorical poetry is absent’. But, prophetically, she concluded, ‘Mr Hamilton has mistaken his opportunity. The idea was not one for treatment in verse. The exigencies of the poetic line prevent such an easy sequence as the allegory demands; but as a prose tale how splendidly it would have flowed!’³⁶ And A.T. Quiller-Couch wrote to Guy Pocock, the editor at Dent, who passed it on to Lewis, ‘Dymer is a fine piece of work: fine in conception and full of brilliant lines and images. Can you convey my thanks to the author of the best new thing I have read for many a long day? He has that gift of metaphor too, which Aristotle was cunning enough to spot as the one quality of style which cannot be taught or imparted because it is genius, and its happy owner is born with it.’

      After Christmas with his father and Warnie (the last Christmas they were all to spend together, for Warnie was posted to the Far East the following April), Lewis began on his next poem, The King of Drum, still feeling that his literary future lay in the direction of epic. The full history of this, perhaps his most successful work of this kind, is given in the introduction to Narrative Poems (1969) where it was first published. Lewis worked eagerly on the poem for a time, but seems to have given it up as Dymer proved more and more obviously to be a failure from the financial point of view. By 1938, when he consulted John Masefield on its merits, he had rewritten it as The Queen of Drum, with a certain amount of Christian symbolism worked into it. Masefield urged publication, and other friends read and enjoyed it from time to time. Lewis read part of it aloud at the Oxford Summer Diversions on 4 August 1938 – but somehow it never won into print, though he was still considering publication twenty years after this.

      The burst of poetic creativity in January 1927 coincided with the first definite evidence for the spiritual worries and struggles that were to lead СКАЧАТЬ