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On C.S. Lewis
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16956 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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4 / 1990 |
5,211 Words |
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Christopher Derrick
Christopher Derrick is a scholar and writer and was a close
friend of C.S. Lewis for more than twenty-five years. |
Oxford, like every other English town, is full of pubs. One of them has acquired exceptional fame. You will see it on your left if you walk in a northerly direction up the board through fare known as St. Giles'. A painted sign outside depicts the Greek legend of Ganymede, carried up to heaven by an eagle: This is the celebrated Bird. Less briefly, it's the Bird and Baby. Officially, it's the Eagle and Child.
If you were to wander into the Bird and lunchtime today, you would see something curious. You would find people there who had simply come in for a drink, but you would find others who - instead or as well-had come in the spirit of pilgrimage, and some of these would probably be Americans. The Bird's small back room has become a kind of shrine, a holy place, richly adorned with photographs and inscriptions, recording the fact that this was once the regular meeting place of a literary and academic group that has caught the imagination of millions.
What was so special about this group? Every university has its clubs and coteries of mutually congenial friends meeting together to discuss all things and a great deal more; such a group will commonly gather around some strong personality and will not long survive him, and it seldom gathers the larger world's attention. This group certainly had its celebrities, notably Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, whose heroic romance The Lord of the Rings would in due course become the most unexpected sort of best-seller: It introduced a whole generation of young people to the unfashionable idea of a moral universe, containing real good and real evil. Others, though scholarly in the highest degree, have acquired little independent fame outside academic circles: Nevill Coghill, Hugo Dyson. Then there was Fr. Gervase Mathew, a Dominican friar of stupendous erudition and equally stupendous eccentricity; and at one time there was Charles Williams, a theological novelist and an almost incomprehensible poet. A full list would be fairly long.
I remember all these people very well, since I had a standing invitation to look in on their regular Tuesday sessions in the Bird and Baby. I then found myself in exceptionally brilliant company. For a young man - this was mostly in the late 1940s, when I had just come back from the war - it was formidably, even overwhelmingly, brilliant. The conversation was sustained high-speed crackle of erudition and wit; to get the full benefit of it, you needed to have far more languages and literatures and philosophies at your fingertips than I could possible muster. I found it widely exhilarating, but I felt out of my
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