By now Tolkien had read much of The Silmarillion to Lewis, and when at the end of 1937 he began to write a sequel to The Hobbit he passed his new chapters to Lewis. ‘Mr Lewis and my youngest boy are reading it in bits as a serial,’ Tolkien told his publishers when reporting on its progress. He also said that the boy (his third son, Christopher) and Lewis ‘approve it enough to say that they think it is better than The Hobbit’.
By the time that Lewis began to read Tolkien’s still untitled new story, he himself had turned his hand to fiction again. His new book began as a joint project, a kind of bargain or wager with Tolkien, who recalled of it: ‘Lewis said to me one day: “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves.”’ What they had in mind was stories that were ‘mythopoeic’ but were thinly disguised as popular thrillers. Tolkien began on ‘The Lost Road’, the tale of a journey back through time to the land of Númenor. Lewis decided to tackle space-travel because he wished to refute what he considered to be a prevalent and dangerous notion: that interplanetary colonisation by mankind was morally acceptable and even a necessary step forward for the human race. (He found this notion clearly expressed by J. B. S. Haldane in the final chapter of Possible Worlds.) He also wanted to do what he had attempted in The Pilgrim’s Regress, to give the Christian story a fresh excitement by retelling it as if it were a new myth. His choice of science fiction as a form was also influenced by his admiration for H. G. Wells – or rather, for Wells’s narrative powers, but not his ideology – and for David Lyndsay, whose Voyage to Arcturus (he said) ‘first suggested to me that the form of “science fiction” could be filled by spiritual experiences’.
Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet was finished by the autumn of 1937. He submitted it to J. M. Dent, who had published Dymer and The Pilgrim’s Regress; but they turned it down. Tolkien then came to Lewis’s aid. He recommended the book in warm terms (though not without criticism) to his own publisher, Stanley Unwin, the chairman of Allen & Unwin who had published The Hobbit. ‘I read the story in the original MS.,’ he told Unwin, ‘and was so enthralled that I could do nothing else until I had finished it. My first criticism was simply that it was too short. I still think that criticism holds, for both practical and artistic reasons. Other criticisms, concerning narrative style (Lewis is always apt to have rather creaking stiff-jointed passages), inconsistent details in the plot, and philology, have since been corrected to my satisfaction. The author holds to items of linguistic invention that do not appeal to me (Malacandra, Maleldil – eldila in any case I suspect to be due to the influence of the Eldar in The Silmarillion –) but this is a matter of taste.’ And Tolkien concluded: ‘I at any rate should have bought this story at almost any price if I had found it in print.’
Allen & Unwin’s readers reported unfavourably on the book, and the firm turned it down. But Stanley Unwin passed it to The Bodley Head, of which he was also chairman, and they accepted it and brought it out a few months later, in the autumn of 1938. Many people were soon echoing Tolkien’s enthusiasm for it. Not that he had been obliged to rely solely on his own judgement in recommending it, for, as he told Stanley Unwin in another letter, after reading the book in manuscript he had ‘heard it pass rather a different test: that of being read aloud to our local club (which goes in for reading things short and long aloud). It proved an exciting serial, and was highly approved. But of course we are all rather like-minded.’
This was in February 1938. In June of the same year, Tolkien wrote (again to Unwin): ‘You may not have noticed that on June 2 the Rev. Adam Fox was elected Professor of Poetry (at Oxford). He was nominated by Lewis and myself, and miraculously elected: our first public victory over established privilege. For Fox is a member of our literary club of practising poets – before whom The Hobbit, and other works (such as the Silent Planet) have been read. We are slowly getting into print.’ Fox was a Magdalen don and had been a friend, though not an intimate, of Lewis for about ten years. As for the ‘literary club of practising poets’, neither of the Lewis brothers was keeping a diary at this time, and there is no mention of it in their papers until more than a year later when, on 11 November 1939, Jack Lewis wrote in a letter to Warnie: ‘On Thursday we had a meeting of the Inklings’.
*
After the dissolution of Tangye Lean’s ‘Inklings’ at University College, the name, Tolkien recalled, ‘was then transferred (by C. S. L.) to the undetermined and unelected circle of friends who gathered about C. S. L. and met in his rooms at Magdalen’. There is no record of precisely when this happened – if indeed it was a precise event and not a gradual process. Tolkien seems to imply that it took place as soon as Tangye Lean’s club broke up, which would be in about 1933. On the other hand there is no contemporary mention of it until Tolkien’s report of their ‘public victory’ in the professorial election of 1938.
Lewis never explained why he transferred the name ‘Inklings’ from the undergraduate club to the group of his friends. Yet there was a certain attraction in its ambiguity. Tolkien said of it: ‘It was a pleasantly ingenious pun in its way, suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas plus those who dabble in ink.’
*
Lewis’s walking tours with his brother and with Barfield came to an end with the outbreak of war. Warnie Lewis had acquired a small two-berth cabin cruiser which he moored at Salter’s boatyard on the Thames in Oxford, and which he called Bosphorus. In August 1939 he arranged to take Jack and Hugo Dyson on a short holiday up the river. But war now seemed likely, and when the time came Warnie, who had rejoined the Royal Army Service Corps with the rank of Major, was obliged to report for army duty. Jack and Dyson had no wish to cancel their trip, but neither of them felt able to manage the practical side of a motor boat; so they enlisted the Lewis family doctor, R. E. Havard, as navigator, he being a man whom Lewis much liked and admired, a Catholic convert who would cheerfully allow Lewis to engage him in a philosophical conversation when they were supposed to be discussing medical symptoms. The party met at Folly Bridge at midday on Saturday 26 August. The pact between Germany and Russia had just been signed, and there was much anxiety about what would be the consequences. ‘Yet’, recalled Havard, ‘our spirits were high at the prospect of a temporary break with politics and daily chores.’
They set off up the Thames from Oxford, following the river through low meadows and past riverside pubs (‘Few of these’, remarked Havard, ‘escaped a visit from us’). On the first evening, after an hour or two spent at the Trout Inn at Godstow, Dyson and Lewis began a vigorous argument about the Renaissance, which Lewis contended had never happened at all, or if it had, hadn’t mattered. They went on through the darkness to the Rose Revived at Newbridge; Lewis and Dyson slept in the inn while Havard spent the night on board. ‘The next morning, Sunday,’ recalled Havard, ‘we moved on to Tadpole Bridge and separated on foot to our respective churches in Buckland a mile or so away. That afternoon after lunch we went on upstream and met, coming down, Robert Gibbings in a canoe, naked to the waist. His bearded figure was greeted rapturously by Lewis with a quotation:
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
At this, Gibbings picked up an enormous conch from the bottom of his canoe and attempted to blow a fanfare on it. After some lively talk, each craft went on its way. Gibbings later put some of the canoe trip into his book Sweet Thames Run Softly.
‘We saw no papers’ (continues Havard) ‘and were cut off from all news except what Lewis and Dyson gathered from the inns where they slept at night. I remember an hour on a riverside lawn waiting for lunch to be ready at Radcot. I remember an evening meal at Lechlade and an expedition upstream for half a mile to Inglesham and the