John Heath-Stubbs on the Inklings in the 1940s

So, the Inklings at Oxford. There's a couple different well-known remarks about them by famous students, primarily after they revised the English Language Syllabus in 1931. This revised syllabus featured Anglo-Saxon rather heavily (even moreso than other British universities at the time) and excluded anything later than the Romantics. Auden, for instance, said that Tolkien's lectures on Beowulf and Anglo-Saxon mesmerized him. Less kindly, Kingsley Amis -- later author of the first academic novel, Lucky Jim -- called Tolkien "incoherent and often inaudible." 

But what did students think of the course-of-study itself?

Well, I was breezing through the autobiography of John Heath-Stubbs, who attended Oxford in the early 1940s, and whose major work is the long epic poem Artorius (1972). To my knowledge, I've not seen any Tolkien scholar ever peruse this source. Anyway, Heath-Stubbs isn't much read nowadays, but if his name rings a bell, it's probably because he admired three different Inklings very deeply: C. S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and ..... Nevill Coghill.

Yep ... Tolkien doesn't make the cut. In fact, Heath-Stubbs's few remarks about Tolkien are rather non-committal. Still, his autobiography contains the following intriguing passage:

Like many undergraduates, I resented having to learn Anglo-Saxon, but I was to change my mind about this. During those war years, the heroic, stoical attitude found in Anglo-Saxon poetry was of immense value. ... In 1936 J.R.R. Tolkien published his famous British Academy lecture entitled 'Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics'. In this he showed that Beowulf should by no means be treated as simply a philological document, but as a great and tragic epic poem. The demand which surfaces every few years or so for the abolition of compulsory Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, and which at present [the mid-1990s] looks as if it may very well succeed, I regard as disgraceful. I am almost tempted to say that English literature since Beowulf is a history of steady decline. (61)

A few remarks about this:

1. Students grumbled about Old English, which isn't surprising, I suppose, but it is interesting.
2. Tolkien actually called Beowulf an "elegy," not an epic, which he explicitly denies . But JHS, who was fully blind at this point, was evidently going from memory, because during the sentences glossed over by my ellipsis ....
3. ...he refers to scholar "W. P. Carr," when he obviously means W. P. Ker.
4. Still, Heath-Stubbs is defending Anglo-Saxon literature in exactly the way that Tolkien himself most often did. Less emphasis on the "native" aspects of the literature, true, but Heath-Stubbs is otherwise just repeating Tolkien's famous argument in a nutshell.

And, of course, his poem Artorius uses the alliterative meter in four of its 12 sections. 

Heath-Stubbs has some good remarks on C. S. Lewis, too. He's the "most exciting lecturer" at Oxford, and his "lectures were a revelation to me [... because] one learnt that there was another way of looking at the cosmos beside that of modern scientific humanism" (62). Heath-Stubbs also claims the only modern writer that Lewis liked, surprisingly, was Franz Kafka, which I'd not heard before. Apparently the reason is that Lewis viewed Kafka as an allegorical writer. Heath-Stubbs also considered The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe as just plagiarism of George MacDonald, so his favorite Lewis novel is actually Till We Have Faces. 

Nevill Coghill was an excellent lecturer as well, but Heath-Stubbs especially admired him as a dramatic producer of plays both inside and outside of Oxford.

But Heath-Stubbs reserves his strongest praises for Charles Williams. He particularly admired one of CW's lectures on Wordsworth, where he's expounding on the "romantic experience", a "means whereby one could obtain through the affirmation of images an experience of transcendental reality" (97). Few ideas would be more influential on Heath-Stubbs, and he describes the various images promoted by Williams: the religious experience, the experience of human love, the experience of nature, the experience of the city and particularly the just society, as well as the vision of great art.

There's also this -- an excerpt of Heath-Stubbs's one and only meeting with Williams: "Of homosexuals, he said we ought to be very kind to such people" (107). Williams most likely made this remark unaware that Heath-Stubbs himself was queer. This makes me like him a little more.

Heath-Stubbs, John. Hindsights: An Autobiography. Hodder & Stoughton, 1993.