Back at Oxford, Jack threw himself into his work, though many things were developing within and around him that would change the course of his life. The first was his growing friendship with another Oxford professor, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. J. R. R. Tolkien—or Tollers, as he was known—was the Rawlingson professor of Anglo-Saxon and fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, and he and Jack had met in 1926 at a combined meeting of the English faculty at Oxford. The two men soon discovered that they had a mutual love of myth and medieval poetry, and before long Tolkien invited Jack to join a group called the Kolbitar, or Coalbiters, a Norse name for a group that sat around the fire talking. However, the Coalbiters did a lot more than just talk. Tolkien set about teaching the members of the group the Norse language. Jack was delighted to find that Tollers used the same method for learning a language that Professor Kirkpatrick (Old Knock) had used with him, and his experience learning German and Anglo-Saxon made the undertaking relatively easy.
The friendship between the two men continued to grow. Tolkien came from a Catholic background, and although Jack did not consider himself a religious man, he soon realized that he had grown up with a strong prejudice against Catholics. At first he found this prejudice hard to break, but the more time he spent with Tolkien, the more he liked him as a person and admired his intellect. As Jack himself had done as a boy back in Belfast, Tolkien had created in his head a vast mythical kingdom peopled with all manner of creatures often engaged in epic battles with each other. Tolkien referred to his mythical world as “Middle-earth.” But whereas Jack had left his boyhood make-believe world behind, Tolkien had continued to develop his and was now beginning to write down the stories of “Middle-earth.” And the stories were good, as Jack found out when Tollers asked him to read the manuscript he was presently working on. The manuscript was titled Lay of Leithian, and Tolkien had been working on it for several years. While the story was not yet finished, Jack was enthralled with it, especially the way Tolkien so deftly wove ancient myths and sagas into his work. Jack was so impressed that he wrote a note to Tolkien:
I sat up late last night and read the Geste [adventure or tale] as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of orcs above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf [an Old English word meaning “garments, weapons taken from the slain”]. I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight; and that personal interest in a friend’s work had very little to do with it. I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value.
Jack wished that he could write with the same caliber and voice as Tolkien. But the truth was that while Jack liked to write, he was having a hard time focusing in on what to write about.
Tolkien and Jack had many discussions about Tolkien’s writing. At the same time Jack was reading G. K. Chesterton’s book The Everlasting Man. The combination of the message of Chesterton’s book and Tolkien’s devout faith began to have an impact on Jack, who found a certain compelling logic in The Everlasting Man that caused him to reevaluate how he thought about God. Eventually Jack decided that he did believe in a God—not a biblical God, but a supreme being of some type who tried to communicate with mankind. Once Jack came to this conclusion, he started to attend the Anglican church as a statement to himself and others that he no longer considered himself to be an atheist.
In late April 1930, seven months after Albert Lewis’s death, Warren finally arrived back in Ireland after a long and eventful voyage from China via the United States. The Lewis brothers reunited at Little Lea and set about the momentous task of breaking up the family home. They divided everything in the house into three piles: one for things they could not part with, another for things they wanted to give away, and the third for things they wanted to sell. Room by room they made their way through Little Lea, emptying each room, until finally they came to their attic hideaway. Here they came upon the large trunk that held their toys, most of which had figured as characters in Jack’s fantasy Animal-Land and Warren’s India. In the end the two brothers decided not to open the trunk but instead carried it to the vegetable garden, where they dug a hole and buried it.
Once everything in the house had been disposed of, Jack and Warren visited their parents’ graves, the dirt on Albert’s grave still freshly turned.
During their time together, Warren confessed to Jack that he was under pressure to resign from the army because he had a problem with alcohol. This did not surprise Jack, who realized that both his older brother and his father had melancholy personalities and did not cope very well with unpleasant or sad situations, and both of them used alcohol freely and frequently to help get them through such times.
Jack and Warren were also faced with another problem. Their father’s estate had turned out to be not worth as much as either brother had thought. Little Lea could be sold for twenty-three hundred pounds, but when this amount was split, it was not enough for either of them to buy a house. It became clear that Jack and Warren would have to pool their money if they wanted to replace their childhood home with a similar place in Oxford.
In fact, the real problem was not so much that the brothers needed to pool their money to buy a home together but that Jack could not imagine separating from his “other family.” Any house he and Warren bought would have to be big enough to share with Mrs. Moore and Maureen. Though Jack harbored secret doubts about all four of them getting along for the rest of their lives, he felt they had to try.
Back in Oxford, Jack, Warren, and Janie set about the task of finding a suitable house to buy. Jack wanted the house to be as much like Little Lea as possible, surrounded by open fields and close to picturesque walks. Of course this was quite a tall order to fulfill, especially on their budget, but eventually Jack and Janie stumbled upon a property called The Kilns. It was called this because of two large kilns that stood like upturned flowerpots beside the house. These kilns had once been used for baking bricks for buildings in the Oxford area. The Kilns was located just outside Oxford and sat on nine acres of wooded land that also contained a lake. On the far side of the two kilns stood a large, open shed that had been used for drying the bricks. Jack and Janie viewed the house on July 7, 1930, and they immediately fell in love with it, especially the grounds.
Several days later Warren returned to Oxford on leave and went to see The Kilns. He, too, was taken with how beautiful the grounds were, but he thought the house might be a little too small for four adults to live in. Nonetheless, he could not deny the beauty of the setting and Jack and Janie’s excitement at the thought of living there. The three of them made an offer to buy the place for thirty-three hundred pounds. On July 16 they received word that their offer had been accepted, and arrangements were then made for a mortgage to cover the portion of the price they did not have. Jack and Warren also signed over their interest in the place so that the house belonged exclusively to Janie Moore and would be passed on to her daughter Maureen when Janie died.
On October 10, 1930, Warren returned to Oxford on leave and helped Jack, Maureen, and Janie move from a rented house in Hillsboron into their new home, The Kilns.
As Jack pushed open the front door of The Kilns and moved in, he wondered what this new phase of his life would be like.
Chapter 8
A Failure of Imagination
The year 1931 began with a long walk, a four-day, fifty-four-mile walk, in fact. Before Warren’s leave was over and he returned to Bulford in Southern England to resume his post as assistant to the officer in charge of supplies and transport, he and Jack decided to take a walking tour of the Wye Valley, located on the Welsh border. The tour was a great success. Each day Warren and Jack walked about twelve miles, taking plenty of time to stop along the way and study the birds and animals that crossed their path. Each night they stopped at a local pub, where they ate a hearty meal before going to sleep in a guesthouse. The experience reminded the Lewis brothers of the cycling trips they had made as boys in Ireland, and both men pledged to go on another walking tour when Warren had more leave. The following week Warren headed back to Bulford.
The following term was a busy one for Jack, though he determined to go to church each Sunday as an outward sign that he now believed in some kind of higher being, which he was content to call “God.” Still, Jack had nagging doubts about his loosely defined set of beliefs and secretly wondered whether there was more to it. He knew that he had embarked on a journey, but he was nervous and unsure as to where that journey might lead.
Some of his doubts surfaced later that year when, on September 19, Jack invited Tolkien and his friend Hugo Dyson to Magdalen College for dinner. Dyson had been an undergraduate with Tolkien at Exeter College and was now a lecturer at Reading University. He also had been a friend of Lawrence of Arabia and knew Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell, and D. H. Lawrence. The conversation over dinner was lively and far ranging.
Following dinner the three men set out for a stroll on Addison’s Walk, the one-mile circuit that wound its way beneath stands of beech trees. As they walked, the discussion turned to the nature of myth and religion. Tolkien made the point that myths and legends originated in God and that they carry some aspect of truth about God. In fact, in writing stories based around these myths, a writer may actually be doing God’s work. Jack nodded in agreement. Tolkien then explained that the Christian story was itself a myth created by a real God, whose dying could transform the lives of those who believed in him. But Jack found this point harder to agree with. He pointed out that he could not see how the death of “someone else” two thousand years before could help much in the here and now, except perhaps so far as that person’s example might help us.
Tolkien walked on a few paces in silence, Jack on one side of him and Dyson on the other. When he finally spoke, he pointed out to Jack that his failure to grasp the central core of the Christian message was mostly a failure of imagination on Jack’s part. He pointed out that Jack had no difficulty in grasping and drawing meaning from the ancient myths of the Greeks and the Norse, but when it came to Christianity, he wanted to put on the cap of a rationalist and wrestle with the logic of the story rather than accept it and draw truth and meaning from it.
At that point a gust of wind rustled the branches of the trees above them, and the sound reminded Jack of a passage from his friend Owen Barfield’s book Poetic Diction. Barfield had made the point that in ancient times people did not make a distinction between myth and fact, between the metaphorical and the literal meaning of words. He pointed out that the word spirit, or spiritus in Latin, meant breath. Today’s rationalist may choose to distinguish between the mere breath and some other elevated state, but those who first formed the language made no such distinction. When they experienced the wind blowing, it was not like someone breathing; rather, it was the actual breath of God.
Tollers looked up at the rustling trees and the flickering stars beyond. As if reading Jack’s mind, he noted that while we speak of stars and trees as material entities, those who first formed the words thought of them very differently. To them the stars were living silver that burst into flame in answer to the music in the mind of God. All creation, Tollers said, reiterating his earlier point, is myth-woven. And, he pressed, Jack was missing out on grasping the essential meaning of the Christian story because he would not allow his imagination to embrace it in the same way he embraced the essential truth and meaning of myths. Instead, when he came to Christianity, he was altogether too much the rationalist and empiricist.
