All this makes it tempting to call Lewis misanthropic, but he liked people well enough — as long as he believed they were a lot like him. He and his circle saw themselves as surrounded by a hostile world intent on destroying everything they valued. Perhaps this kept Lewis from recognizing that even as he condemned the pursuit of the “inner ring,” he was often hard at work constructing such rings and determining who would or would not be let in. Membership was based on a presumed uniformity of taste as well as a generally conservative outlook. “Authors whom he did not admire,” write Walter Hooper and Roger Lancelyn Green in their biography of Lewis, “such as James and Lawrence, he would dismiss as ‘not for us’ in conversation with literary friends.” There’s not much air between “not for us” and “not our kind,” the watch phrase of the snob and the bigot.
But why did Lewis, who suffered so much misery under the reign of the Malvern bloods as a boy, wind up defending traditionalism as a man? Like his father, he was a creature of habit who feared change. He had seen his beloved countryside eroded by the modernization that many of his contemporaries regarded as an unalloyed good. He believed that modern art and literature were implacably set against faith and beauty, two qualities he cherished. And finally, in puzzling out this contradiction, it’s worth remembering that the most energetic defender of an inner ring is often the member whose own standing is a bit tenuous.
Many of Lewis’s casual readers are surprised to learn that he wasn’t actually English, so entirely did he embody the role of shabby-genteel British gentleman. Descriptions of him make it sound as if Mole, from The Wind in the Willows (a favorite book of Lewis’s, one that he felt embodied the best of Britishness), had jumped off the page and taken a job as an Oxford don. When Lewis first arrived at the university, just before the First World War, he surely must have felt himself to be something of an outsider, the son of an undistinguished Belfast solicitor on scholarship among the wealthy and well-born British graduates of schools like Eton and Harrow. If Lewis rarely discussed the inevitable discomfort of this position, perhaps that was because the type of Englishman he sought to emulate put a high premium on a confident indifference.
Nevertheless, whenever Lewis felt unsure of himself, his Irishness would come flooding back. In the two years after he completed his undergraduate education, his future as a professional scholar remained unclear. His domestic situation with Mrs. Moore and her daughter made relocating to another university town untenable, so his choices were limited. He applied unsuccessfully for a couple of fellowships in Philosophy, a subject that (with Classics, or Greats) was one of his original areas of study. When he took a position on the English faculty at Magdalen College, it was the best alternative he could get, and it meant accepting that he’d never become a professional philosopher, as he had once planned. By way of reconciling himself to this new course, he cited his Irish temperament. “I have come to think,” he wrote to his father, “that if I have the mind, I have not the brain and nerves for a life of pure philosophy…. What is a tonic to the Saxon may be a debauch to us Celts.”
To his Celtic blood (which was really more Welsh than Irish), Lewis attributed all the whimsy, mysticism, and gloom conventionally associated with that ethnicity. This he regarded ambivalently, as an inheritance from his moody father, a descendant of Welsh farmers. To his mind, his mother’s family, the Hamiltons, represented practicality, common sense, and a cool, ironic view of life; his mother earned a B.A. in mathematics from Queen’s College in Belfast, but her son, sometimes to his despair, never inherited her aptitude with numbers. Through his maternal grandmother he claimed descent from a Norman knight interred at Battle Abbey in Sussex — if not an Anglo-Saxon, then at the least a very English forebear. Jack complained that his paternal relatives and Celts in general were “sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical,” but when asked to temper his heavy breathing during a radio recording session, he responded, “Did you ever know an Irishman who didn’t puff and blow?”
You can listen to a few audio clips of Lewis reading from his apologetics on the Web. No trace of a brogue — if he ever had one — remains in the deep, plummy intonations issuing from the speakers in my laptop as I write this. What I hear is a stately Oxbridge voice that rolls majestically onward, holding its vowels in the pockets at the back of the cheeks like a chipmunk guarding his hoard of nuts. I have no expertise in accents, but to my ears Lewis did a pretty good job of passing for English. Yet everything about himself that didn’t quite fit this persona, and many of the traits that would eventually lie closest to his heart, he would label “Irish” — so at the very center of his embodiment of tweedy, no-nonsense, old-fashioned Englishness lay a crumb of exception.
There were other reasons why Lewis never felt entirely at home in Oxford. In his early years, he had to hide his relationship with Mrs. Moore. As recently as the late nineteenth century, the university had required celibacy of its fellows (who were originally required to be priests), and it remained fairly straitlaced. Until Minto was old enough to be presented as a plausible “mother,” the scandal of getting caught living with a married woman might have seriously damaged Lewis’s academic career. (Around the same time, the critic William Empson was famously sent down from Cambridge in disgrace because a servant discovered condoms in his room.)
There was intellectual friction, too. The little crowd that Lewis gathered around him at Oxford (including Tolkien, also an odd duck by virtue of his Catholicism) he envisioned as a rearguard defense against an atheistic, progressive contingent he believed to be unofficially running things. Many of Lewis’s academic adversaries regarded him as the representative of an entrenched old regime, and when he and Tolkien succeeded in instating a new syllabus for the English faculty that excluded works published after 1830, they appeared to have a point. Even though Lewis won that battle, he never seemed able to settle into an image of himself as an insider.
On top of this, his contempt for administration and politicking of any sort made Lewis unpopular among the rest of the faculty. Many of his colleagues considered the popular success of his Christian apologetics in print and on the radio to be vulgar. Others resented both his proselytizing and his opposition to any sort of modernization. Still others found his manner objectionable; he could be rude and overbearing in debate and scornful of college protocol and anyone who disagreed with him. Students flocked to his lectures, but they were not the ones who voted dons into professorships, and when Lewis campaigned to be made Chair of Poetry at Oxford in 1951, his peers elected someone else. (He would later accept a similar position at Cambridge.)
No wonder, then, that politics was something of a bête noire for Lewis, an imponderable factor that bored and thwarted him and niggled at his secret insecurities. In Narnia, where biology replaces politics, things are much simpler. Only in The Last Battle does anyone — the ape Shift, who is in effect the Antichrist — aspire beyond his station. The beginning of politics is, in Narnia, the beginning of the end of the world.
Of course, it’s absurd to speak of the “politics” of Narnia. These are children’s fantasies, not designed to address such adult concerns as class systems, nationalism, and economics. They take place in a dream world where talking beavers bake marmalade rolls despite having no surplus goods to trade for oranges and sugar, commodities that can only have been imported from a warmer land. Who raises and slaughters the pigs to make the bacon and sausages gobbled up at almost every Narnian meal? Who grows the wheat and grinds the flour for bread, and who imports the tea and coffee? Even Tolkien, who labored for countless hours to make Middle-earth a consistent, coherent alternative world, never made it entirely plausible economically, and he thought Narnia a disgracefully slapdash creation.