Read Online The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski - Free Book Online
Authors: Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
Ads: Link
a fantastic ü ber-realm they called Boxen. Lewis furnished this new land with an elaborate if choppy history from medieval to modern times, composed with relentless attention to detail. He proved to be a “systematizer” akin to Trollope; Boxen was his Barsetshire, and he filled it with citizens and statesmen like the frog Lord John Big (a father figure, according to Surprised by Joy , and “a prophetic portrait of Sir Winston Churchill”); Big’s nemesis, the navy lieutenant and bear James Barr (who was, Lewis would later say, remarkably like the poet John Betjeman, who would be his most challenging pupil at Oxford); Orring the lizard MP; and assorted Chessmen of low birth, all drawn with an ungainly realism as mirrors of the adult society Lewis knew best, preoccupied with questions of money, politics, and power.
There was little enchanting about Boxen itself. Its magic resided in the bond it forged between two brothers, beginning in the idyllic years before their mother’s death. As different as Animal-Land was from India, as different as Jack was from Warnie, they succeeded in creating a common imaginary world that they would share until Lewis’s death. “Neither of us ever made any attempt to keep that vanished world alive,” Warnie recalled, “but we found that its language had become a common heritage of which we could not rid ourselves. Almost up to the end, ‘Boxonian’ remained for Jack a treasured tongue in which he could communicate with me, and with me only. The Harley street specialist of that world had been a small china salmon, by name Dr. Arrabudda; and Jack, during the closing weeks of his life, on the days when his specialist was due to visit him, would say to me with a smile, ‘I’ll be seeing that fellow Arrabudda this morning.’”
Unlike Tolkien, Lewis didn’t turn to writing to escape from family tragedy. His motive was far more ordinary: writing was the most ready-to-hand amusement for a child confined to the house whenever the weather threatened. He began to write in the limpid dawn of an idyllic childhood, before his mother’s death, when he was little “Jacksie” to his beloved brother “Badgie,” and their parents confided in each other as “Doli” to “dearest old Bear.” He set down, in his first diary, the picture of a household that was settled and secure, though not without its irritants: “Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her chief industry, etc., etc. I am generaly wearing a jersy…”
Lewis enjoyed the constant companionship of his brother, and when Warnie went to school in 1905, the two kept up a correspondence. Lewis also wrote about Warnie in his diary: “Hoora!! Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into the room, we shake hands and begin to talk … Well I was glad to have him but of course we had our rows afterwards…”
This loving companionship would prosper, despite separations and occasional rows, for the rest of Lewis’s life. Three years older than his brother, heavier, and more earthbound in his hobbies and interests, Warnie comes across in letters and diaries—his own as well as his brother’s—as a gentle man forever devoted to Lewis (though sometimes exasperated by him), with a character more gracious to others and less assertive of his own interests than his famous sibling possessed. John Wain, not the most tender-minded of Inklings, described Warnie as “the most courteous [man] I have ever met—and not with mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetful considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing.” Warnie would become an active Inkling in his own right, the author of several books on seventeenth- and
There was little enchanting about Boxen itself. Its magic resided in the bond it forged between two brothers, beginning in the idyllic years before their mother’s death. As different as Animal-Land was from India, as different as Jack was from Warnie, they succeeded in creating a common imaginary world that they would share until Lewis’s death. “Neither of us ever made any attempt to keep that vanished world alive,” Warnie recalled, “but we found that its language had become a common heritage of which we could not rid ourselves. Almost up to the end, ‘Boxonian’ remained for Jack a treasured tongue in which he could communicate with me, and with me only. The Harley street specialist of that world had been a small china salmon, by name Dr. Arrabudda; and Jack, during the closing weeks of his life, on the days when his specialist was due to visit him, would say to me with a smile, ‘I’ll be seeing that fellow Arrabudda this morning.’”
Unlike Tolkien, Lewis didn’t turn to writing to escape from family tragedy. His motive was far more ordinary: writing was the most ready-to-hand amusement for a child confined to the house whenever the weather threatened. He began to write in the limpid dawn of an idyllic childhood, before his mother’s death, when he was little “Jacksie” to his beloved brother “Badgie,” and their parents confided in each other as “Doli” to “dearest old Bear.” He set down, in his first diary, the picture of a household that was settled and secure, though not without its irritants: “Papy of course is the master of the house, and a man in whom you can see strong Lewis features, bad temper, very sensible, nice wen not in a temper. Mamy is like most middle-aged ladys, stout, brown hair, spectaciles, kniting her chief industry, etc., etc. I am generaly wearing a jersy…”
Lewis enjoyed the constant companionship of his brother, and when Warnie went to school in 1905, the two kept up a correspondence. Lewis also wrote about Warnie in his diary: “Hoora!! Warnie comes home this morning. I am lying in bed waiting for him and thinking of him, before I know where I am I hear his boots pounding on the stairs, he comes into the room, we shake hands and begin to talk … Well I was glad to have him but of course we had our rows afterwards…”
This loving companionship would prosper, despite separations and occasional rows, for the rest of Lewis’s life. Three years older than his brother, heavier, and more earthbound in his hobbies and interests, Warnie comes across in letters and diaries—his own as well as his brother’s—as a gentle man forever devoted to Lewis (though sometimes exasperated by him), with a character more gracious to others and less assertive of his own interests than his famous sibling possessed. John Wain, not the most tender-minded of Inklings, described Warnie as “the most courteous [man] I have ever met—and not with mere politeness, but with a genial, self-forgetful considerateness that was as instinctive to him as breathing.” Warnie would become an active Inkling in his own right, the author of several books on seventeenth- and
Similar Books
