It was three o’clock in the morning when Tolkien finally left the group to return home, leaving Jack and Dyson to talk for another hour.
Jack thought a lot about the words Tollers had spoken that night. He found a certain compelling logic in Tolkien’s argument. Indeed he did tend to use two different modes of thought when he approached myths and the Christian story, and this was holding him back from discovering the truth of Christianity. He continued to think about the conversation throughout the next week. He still had many questions, but he had to admit that Tolkien’s approach made Christianity sound more appealing and believable. Still, Jack wondered whether he could ever fully embrace ideas that seemed odd to him, especially the concept that Jesus was the Son of God and that He died for everyone’s sins. It just seemed too fantastic. But then Tolkien’s words would come back to him. Was his friend right? Did he, Jack, lack the imagination necessary to believe?
Jack summarized his conversation with Tolkien and Dyson in a letter to his boyhood friend Arthur Greeves:
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: and again, that if I met the idea of god sacrificing himself to himself…I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving God (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.”
Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing himself through “real things.”
On Monday, September 28, 1931, nine days after his enlightening conversation with Tolkien and Dyson, Jack went on an outing to Whipsnade Zoo with Warren, who was about to leave for China for his second posting there; Janie Moore, her daughter Maureen, and her Irish friend Vera Henry; and their dog, Mr. Papworth. It was decided that the women and Mr. Papworth would ride in the motorcar to the zoo, while Jack would travel with Warren in the sidecar of his motorcycle. (It was not an option for Jack to drive. He never held any kind of driver’s license, and the idea of controlling a mechanical vehicle seemed to overwhelm him.)
A heavy fog clung to the ground as the group set out. But by the time Jack and Warren reached the city of Thame several miles away, the fog had dissipated and the sun was shining. Along the way the brothers stopped to put gasoline in the motorcycle. By two in the afternoon they reached Whipsnade and stopped on the outskirts of the village to wait for the women. When the car arrived, they all continued in convoy to the zoo.
Jack and Warren particularly enjoyed the zoo, wandering around looking at the animals. Jack made friends with a bear, whom he nicknamed Bultitude, and confessed to his brother that his dream was to have a pet bear at The Kilns. (Fortunately for all who lived at The Kilns, he never did manage to get a pet bear. However, Bultitude the bear would appear as a character in the book That Hideous Strength, the third book in a space trilogy that Jack would publish in 1945.)
All in all, the trip to Whipsnade Zoo was an uneventful outing, except for one thing. As Jack himself would later put it in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, “I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion.”
Somewhere between The Kilns and Whipsnade Zoo Jack’s imagination had expanded, and he had arrived at the kind of belief that Tolkien had talked to him about. Two days after the trip to the zoo, Jack put his thoughts into words in a letter to Arthur Greeves: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ…. My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a great deal to do with it.”
Jack continued on with his practice of going to the Anglican church in the village of Headington Quarry, near The Kilns. He also began attending the morning chapel service at Magdalen College on weekdays. He felt an obligation to do both, though he did not enjoy the experience much. In fact, he later wrote that he disliked just about everything to do with traditional church services. “To me, religion ought to have been a matter of good men praying alone and meeting by twos and threes to talk of spiritual matters. And then the fussy, time-wasting botheration of it all! The bells, the crowds, the umbrellas, the notices, the bustle, the perpetual arranging and organizing.” He even admitted, “Hymns were (and are) extremely disagreeable to me. Of all musical instruments I liked (and like) the organ least. I have, too, a sort of spiritual gaucherie [awkwardness] which makes me unapt to participate in any rite.”
In January 1932, just three months after his own spiritual renewal, Jack learned that his brother Warren had committed himself to God and had started attending church in Shanghai, where he was once again stationed. This was a great relief to Jack and an encouragement that he was headed in the right direction. Meanwhile, he and Janie planned and supervised the addition of a wing to The Kilns so that Warren would have a place to call his own when he finally left the army and came to live with them for good.
Jack was thirty-three years old when he became a Christian and felt he had a whole new world to explore. As could be expected, he chose to do this exploration via reading and writing. He started writing a novel titled The Moving Image, but he soon ran out of motivation and began writing a long poem. He ran out of steam on that project too. It was not until he was back in Belfast visiting his friend Arthur in the spring of 1932 that Jack got a new idea for a book, which he would call The Pilgrim’s Regress. Jack was very familiar with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, written nearly 250 years before. This was the allegorical story of a man named Christian who goes on a journey to find salvation. Jack decided that it would be interesting to write a similar sort of story about a man named John, who leaves his home in Puritania, believing it to be under the rule of a tyrant, and who, after a long journey, returns to find that he had entirely misinterpreted the situation—that the man he thought was a tyrant was, in fact, a benevolent man.
The storyline of The Pilgrim’s Regress echoed Jack’s own journey, starting life in a reasonably pious home, losing hope in God through the death of his mother and his time spent in boarding schools, and finally coming full circle back to Christian piety at Oxford.
The book was published soon after Jack finished it, but it was never a financial success. Still, Jack had immensely enjoyed the process of writing the book. Writing narrative fiction seemed to come easily to him as he wrote by hand on paper with a nibbed pen that he had to keep dipping in ink. The publishing of The Pilgrim’s Regress represented a turning point in Jack’s life. It was the first time Jack had written about a religious theme and the first time he had published anything other than poetry. These two changes transformed his writing career and set him on the long and twisting path that would lead to a mythical place he would call Narnia.
Chapter 9
Inklings
In 1933 a group called the “Inklings” began meeting together. Jack was the unofficial leader and instigator of the gathering. The group would convene in his rooms at Magdalen College on Thursday evenings and for lunch on Mondays or Fridays (or both days) in a back room of The Eagle and Child, a pub that most Oxford locals referred to as “The Bird and Baby.” The purpose of the Inklings was for the members to get together to read their poems or other literary work and then give each other feedback, encouragement, and criticism. The group allowed plenty of time for general discussion and frivolity. From time to time a new person would be invited to attend the Inklings, and if the other Inklings liked the person’s contribution to the conversation, they made him a permanent member.
Jack, his brother Warren, and J. R. R. Tolkien remained three of the Inklings’ most regular members, along with their doctor, Robert Havard. It was fashionable for upper-class English men and women to have nicknames, and Jack started calling Dr. Havard by the initials “U. Q.,” which stood for Useless Quack. The name stuck with the doctor during his entire time with the Inklings.
The Inklings served two main purposes in Jack’s life. First, it gave Jack a circle of male friends whom he could spend enjoyable time with two or three times a week. Second, the meetings challenged him to continue his writing and present bits and pieces of his work for critique.
Meanwhile, Warren, who had been discharged from the army after eighteen years of service in December 1932 and now lived at The Kilns with Jack and Janie, had set himself a great task. When their father died, Jack and Warren inherited all of the Lewis and Hamilton family papers and photographs. Now Warren decided to put them all in order, write up as much information as he knew about each item, and have everything bound into volumes. When the first volume of the Lewis Papers was finished, Jack was impressed with the result. The volume represented hundreds of hours of tedious research, collating, reading, and writing on Warren’s part.
About the time Warren finished collating the first volume of family papers, Jack began to get “fan mail” about The Pilgrim’s Regress. Not a lot at first, just the odd letter from someone who either wanted to congratulate him on his writing style or had a specific question regarding something he’d written. Warren, who typed very slowly and laboriously, offered to answer Jack’s correspondence. This was a task that would eventually turn into a full-time job.
The year 1934 started with the Lewis brothers going on their third annual walking tour. Once again they chose the Wye Valley, enjoying each other’s company and the challenges of walking the countryside in midwinter. Or at least they enjoyed the countryside most of the time. On January 4, Warren wrote in his diary:
Called at seven and got up by the light of one solitary candle, to the disquieting sound of the wind roaring in the eaves. As the daylight came, saw that in addition to the wind, a driving horizontal rain was coming out of a grey sky. However, we decided to face it, and were on the road soon after half past eight. About half a mile brought us to the point where our track left the main road, and although it was marked “Private,” no one appeared to mind our using it…. A little further on we came upon a single plank stretched across the stream, and with some misgivings entrusted ourselves to it: J[ack] merely got his shoes wet, but it bent under my weight until the water ran over the tops of my trousers—but we were already so wet, that at that moment this seemed to produce little extra discomfort. We were now in really open country—nothing in front of us but a steep hill up which we began one of the most exhausting climbs I have ever undertaken: the rain beat down on us incessantly, the soggy ground was full of waterholes and subterranean rivulets, and worst of all, the higher we got, the thicker became the fog.
Eventually the brothers agreed that it was pointless to go on. They had reached a height of about seventeen hundred feet and had completely lost their bearings in the fog. They turned around and found their way down the hill until they came to an abandoned tin mine, where they took shelter. They sat together in the mine, waiting for the worst of the weather to pass. But the rain and wind did not abate, and eventually Jack and Warren headed back out into the storm, bent nearly double against the force of the wind, until they came to the town of Ponterwyd. Again Warren picked up the story in his journal:
Here we were lucky in falling into the hands of a really kindly and intelligent landlady, who grasped the situation at once—got us as hot a bath as the house could produce at that hour of the day, and gave us beds with hot water bottles in them, while all our clothes were taken down to the kitchen to dry. Half an hour later she came up to our rooms with dressing gowns and offered us the use of her sitting room to have lunch in our pyjamas—and though the lunch was stewed steak, I most heartily enjoyed it.
Jack and Warren spent the rest of the day at the hotel, reading and waiting for their clothes to dry. The next day they set out again, though this time by bus to Aberystwyth, Wales, where they enjoyed rummaging around tiny bookstores and ducking into local shops and pubs. They visited the University of Wales, which was located in the town. On display in the university’s library, much to Jack’s delight, was a copy of Shakespeare used by Samuel Johnson in compiling A Dictionary of the English Language nearly two hundred years before. Words were underlined throughout the volume, and Johnson’s notes were clearly visible in the margins of the pages. Warren also located in the library a copy of a paper Jack had written on medieval literature.
