The Oxford Lewis Knew

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Magdalen College, Oxford, 2023. Julian Herzog (Website), CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

While Simon Horobin points out that, despite contrary claims, no “original lamppost” inspired the iconic image in Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, he does not condemn the impulse to look for physical associations with literary experiences. Nor does he think Lewis would. While Lewis opposed the psychoanalytic approach to criticism that interprets literature from the perspective of the author’s biography, he also argued that visiting enchanted woods in stories should make our experience of real woods more enchanting. (171) It is healthy for someone who visits Narnia to start seeing real lampposts as magical beacons.

Horobin’s new book, C. S. Lewis’s Oxford, is a biography of sorts, but treats the various places of Lewis’s Oxford as characters in his story. Chapter titles such as “University College,” “Eagle and Child,” “Eastgate Hotel,” and subheadings such as “Oscar Wilde Room,” “Addison’s Walk,” etc. display the organizing principle. (Readers not familiar with Oxford should have a map handy as the street names are too small to read on the map included in the book’s otherwise excellent collection of images.)

The details of Lewis’s early life in Oxford are almost overwhelming in their picture of contingency. As a World War I veteran, Lewis was able to skip retaking the math portion of the Oxford entrance exam (he failed his first attempt). Surviving the war was itself an act of providence. Horobin tells the sobering story of Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, a friend Lewis made during the war, who had also received a scholarship to Oxford. The same shell that injured Lewis killed Johnson. “[H]ow many brilliant young men, like Lewis, with promising Oxford careers ahead of them, never returned to the university.” (12) The Oxford Lewis returned to after the war was a changed place. Horobin quotes memoirs recounting how the students of this period were especially diligent with a “thirst for truth” that lead to much less carousing and much more “scribbling away in their notebooks like lunatics” (13-14).

Post-graduation, Lewis could not count on securing an academic job among stiff competition, nearly despairing of finding something beyond grading entrance exams or cram tutoring. (28, 33) Then a tutorial fellowship in English opened up at Magdalen College, setting off a humorous chain of events. Lewis initially did not apply, deferring to a former professor he believed wanted the job only to learn he was mistaken. When he sought his professors’ support, he learned they had already backed Lewis’s friend Neville Coghill, thinking Lewis’s slowness to apply meant he did not want the job. Thankfully for Lewis, Coghill received a different appointment, Lewis’s professors switched their support to him, and he got the job that enabled him to stay in Oxford.

In Oxford, Lewis sought out and formed many associations. While still an undergrad, he was elected president of the literary society, the Martlets (still active today), where he developed ideas that would turn into The Personal Heresy and “On Stories.” He joined the “Kolbitars” group founded by Tolkien for the reading of Old Icelandic, attended a fortnightly philosophy dinner, and joined “the Cave” meetings of English dons (named after the Cave of Adullam). (55) Once tutoring, Lewis himself hosted regular “Beer and Beowulf” nights for first-year undergraduates and weekly readings of Shakespeare plays to combat the growing illiteracy he perceived among undergraduates. He was elected president of the “Mermaid Club” for Elizabethan play-reading, though its puerile members strained his patience. He founded the “Michaelmas Club” to discuss philosophy and literature to stimulate more intellectual extra-curricular life in the college. He apparently thought the post-war sobriety was giving way to too much “rowing, drinking, motoring and fornication.” (57) After his conversion he started a theology discussion group to address the theological ignorance he felt “would have shocked an eighteenth-century infidel.” (59) He did all this besides the better known twice-weekly Inklings and weekly Socratic Club meetings.

Horobin has diligently scoured the secondary sources while also using his plum position as Professor of English Language and Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford to unearth heretofore unpublished primary source gems. He includes invective poems (in multiple languages) that Lewis wrote during his undergraduate philology courses, (18) and excerpts from Lewis’s memoir of his year as Vice President of Magdalen, “The Tragi-Comicall Briefe Reigne of Lewis the Bald,” a five-act drama written in blank verse in the official register of the college. (70) He includes a resurrection hymn Lewis was invited to write, that’s not available in any of Lewis’s poetry collections. (153-154) As a contemporary academic in Oxford, Horobin helpfully comments on the continuity or discontinuity of syllabi, ceremonies, and street corners.

One may wonder why a chapter on “Cambridge” belongs in such a book, but Lewis continued to reside in Oxford after taking on the professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, and the contrast between the two universities illuminates the significance of each. Lewis initially declined the job, much to the dismay of those who invented the post specifically for him, on the grounds of not wanting to abandon his “general Factotum” Paxford (his gardener on whom Puddleglum was modeled). (146) Once he took the job and found the environs friendlier to Christianity, his brother Warnie wondered if Lewis had gotten on the wrong train, those many years ago, when he went to study at Oxford. What if Lewis had gone to Cambridge, the more Christian university but one that embraced modern literary criticism over understanding the historical context? Would he have felt compelled to defend his faith, if he had ever achieved it without Tolkien and other Oxford friends? It is clear that Lewis’s scholarly output at Cambridge, Studies in Words and The Discarded Image, aimed at correcting trends he disapproved in Cambridge studies, but what if he had been intellectually brought up in Cambridge himself? (157)

The reasoning for the “Global Lewis” chapter at the end is harder to grasp, but it focuses on the now dispersed relics of Lewis’s life—the materials at the Wade Center at Wheaton, the Kilns under the management of the Lewis Foundation—and also the reciprocal nature of influence evidenced by the various plaques, murals, and memorials erected in places associated with Lewis, in Ireland and elsewhere. This last chapter, which ends rather abruptly, makes the book feel almost like a pilgrimage guide.

The book is not flawless. The rationale behind the ordering of the collected images, “plates,” is undiscernible. There are nuggets in the plates or footnotes he omits from the text (e.g. that Narnia was originally about the youngest child, Peter from plate 17, or that critics have plausibly argued that A Grief Observed may be more calculated and less raw scribblings than it is presented (notes 63 and 64 from chapter 5). He sometimes fails to identify sources for interesting claims. The ordering of some content is surprising: an interesting section on Lewis’s female correspondents is buried under the subsection “The Cosmic Trilogy” in the middle of “The Eagle and Child” chapter and the coverage of Lewis’s work with the BBC found in the “Vice Presidency” subsection of the “Magdalen” chapter.

In humility and honest scholarship, Horobin points out that Lewis himself says that he was more familiar with the Wild Wood of The Wind in the Willows and Hrothgar’s court from Beowulf than he was with the city of Oxford. (173) Undoubtedly the leaf mold of Lewis’s reading had the greater influence on his imaginative harvest than did any geographical associations he inhabited.

But it was still Oxford associations that shaped who he was and what he produced. He formed no Inklings equivalent in Cambridge. Dorothy Sayers failed to get an Oxford-style Socratic Club off the ground in London. (133) Is it just the environment? Horobin quotes fantasy writer Philip Pullman who says amid the mists from the river and ancient buildings, who can help imagining the gargoyles coming down at night to fight with one another? (172) But atmosphere alone would not suffice but for the people drawn there. Horobin sums it up well when he says:

“In Oxford, Lewis found a group of fellow scholars and writers that prompted him repeatedly to experience what he considered to be the typical beginning of a friendship: ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ Such encounters and follow-up conversations were greatly facilitated by Oxford’s rich assortment of public houses, college dining halls and senior common rooms.” (173)

Josiah Peterson (M.A. Houston Christian University) teaches Humane Letters at Chandler Preparatory Academy in Arizona.

Read more about C. S. Lewis's everyday life in CH issue #140 Jack at home.