The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter

Author:Humphrey Carpenter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2017-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Mrs Moore:

No. It was much colder the year my grandfather died.

Myself:

Oh I’m not quoting from one of those chatty newspaper articles about the weather, but from the official statistics.

Mrs Moore:

Then the man who wrote them was a fool. It was much colder the year my grandfather died.

Mrs Moore’s company cannot have improved Lewis’s opinion of the female mind. His involvement with her perhaps also goes some way towards explaining his almost aggressive refusal to discuss deeply personal matters with his men friends. In the nineteen-twenties his private life had been a mystery to his friends, and he had refused to explain his feelings for Mrs Moore even to Warnie. During the thirties she became more and more demanding, and by the time war broke out she had grown into a tyrannical and perhaps not entirely sane old woman. Lewis continued to behave towards her with infinite and unfailing charity, scarcely ever complaining about her even to Warnie, let alone to anyone else. So why should he encourage other people to complain about their domestic difficulties or discuss their problems? Lewis’s friends sometimes found this attitude tiresome. It annoyed Tolkien, who often wanted to find a sympathetic ear for the tale of his domestic troubles.

But despite this attitude to women and this desire to avoid talking about personal things, Lewis did not enter into male friendship in a manner that could be described as hearty or boorish. He was capable also of great delicacy and sensitivity, perhaps even feminine sensitivity. He once said: ‘I can’t bear “a man’s man” or “a woman’s woman”. There ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man.’ Indeed it might be said that the femininity in him contributed to the friendships of the Inklings.

This is not to say that he was homosexual. He does not appear ever to have felt any overt sexual attraction towards other men, and he said of this, ‘How a man can feel anything but bewildering pity for the genuinely homosexual I’ve never been able to understand.’ In The Four Loves he argued forcibly that it is ridiculous to suppose all male friendships to be founded on sexual attraction. On the other hand he was disturbed by homosexuality: the considerable space which he devotes to it in his account of school life in his autobiography shows as much. Perhaps (as has been suggested) one can also see in his shabby manner of dress – baggy trousers, old mackintosh, squashed hat – a wish to differentiate himself from the homosexual-dandy fashions of Oxford in the late twenties and early thirties.

Yet for somebody who did not experience overt homosexual feelings, and perhaps even feared them, Lewis was prepared to admit a considerable element of something like the erotic into his notions of friendship between man and man. In The Allegory of Love he discusses the nature of male friendship in early medieval society, this being an era when (as he believed) romantic heterosexual love played a negligible part in life as well as literature.

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