Reflection on AC Spearing's reflection on CS Lewis

Just happened to glance at the latest issue of Journal of Inklings Studies, and I immediately saw a reflection by A. C. Spearing on C. S. Lewis as a research supervisor while at Cambridge University in the mid-1950s.** This struck me for two reasons. First, I've been reading a shit-ton of Lewis's literary scholarship lately, and I HAVE THOUGHTS. Second, Spearing is one of the few medievalists whom I've actually read. Way back during my time at Ohio State, I encountered Textual Subjectivity (2005) while taking a medieval literature course, and now learning that Spearing had studied under CSL is mesmerizing me.

Anyway, I loved Spearing's reflection, and I'd highly recommend it. There are several passages I want to comment on specifically, so I'll take them in order.

• p. 112: "As is indicated by the quotation marks round ‘supervisor’ in his letter, and by its general tone of reluctance, Lewis was opposed to the professionalization of literary research and the introduction of research degrees such as the Oxford BLitt and the DPhil, with the accompanying expectation that, as in German and American universities, candidates should be trained in research methods and should situate their work in the whole existing field of relevant publications."

This remark speaks to that I HAVE THOUGHTS comment from earlier. This whole statement is mind-blowing to me as a modern-day researcher, but it's true. Reading Preface to Paradise Lost, for example, which continues to be ridiculously influential in Milton Studies even 80 years after its first appearance, I was continuously stuck by how few citations of other scholarly work Lewis included.

Obviously, such a practice wouldn't pass muster today, for all sorts of good reasons, but it's also what has made writing literary criticism increasing time-consuming for academics, both in research time and in writing time. For instance, if I was allowed to rely on memory alone, I could easily draft 2,000 words a day, & finish articles in only a few drafts. Blog posts, for instance, go insanely more quickly for me than scholarly writing of comparable length. However, the need for concision and keeping my arguments engaged with critical discourse pretty much quadruples the time I spend writing academic articles.

So what was Lewis's method? Well, the following sure as hell rings true:

• p. 113: "For Lewis, literary research, however advanced, should be motivated by individual interest and curiosity and would be based on the study of primary texts in their original languages."
• (bonus): p. 112: "Except when commissioned, as the Sixteenth Century and Paradise Lost books were, research was a personal matter that came second to undergraduate teaching."

The first quote speaks to what else I've noticed about Lewis's criticism -- the fact that although he's read more canonical English literature than any professor I know personally (myself, for example, I'm just reading Paradise Lost and The Canterbury Tales in their entireties for the first time!), Lewis could only really accomplish this because he didn't have to read a dozen scholarly subfields of research. Before the explosion of publication in the 1970s (largely thanks to publish-or-perish), literary critics from prior generations really did just pick off the low-hanging fruit.

• p. 114: "This exercise, involving a fortuitous convergence of Lewis’s focus on primary texts with the ‘close reading’ strongly emphasized in the Cambridge undergraduate course."

Spearing is referencing Lewis's directive that he closely study the A, B, and C texts of Piers Plowman while ignoring all secondary scholarship on the poem. As I was recently reading The Personal Heresy, Lewis's debate with E.M.F. Tillyard, I was struck by just how much Lewis's methods of reading really do converge with New Criticism. Although Oxford and Cambridge were then certainly engaged in quite different models of criticism, the discrepancy is less stark than the picture painted in Maria Sachiko Cecire's Re-enchantment (2019), for instance. 

• p. 115: "In the summer of 1958, seeing that I was not being helped to keep up with current scholarship and criticism on Piers Plowman, Mrs Zeeman [Elizabeth Salter] managed to persuade the Degree Committee that she should take over from Lewis as my supervisor. She remained my supervisor until, I think, 1963, and under her guidance I came near to completing my dissertation. It was on a much narrower topic than I’d originally intended – a common experience, of course, among PhD students."

Spearing eventually burned out of his program, and in his later career, he admits to being one of the last tenured professors at the University of Virginia who never held a terminal research degree. Today, for current PhDs, that kind of scenario is virtually unimaginable, but high rates of burn out and academic self-loathing are, I think, one unintended consequence of the "read everything!" German research model as compared to its more dilettantish British counterpart. 

• p. 115: "I feel sure that that theoretical approach to critical technique, put forward in Criticism and Medieval Poetry, did not much appeal to Lewis, though he never said so. I could not model myself on him as a scholar, widely learned in theology and in classical literature and philosophy as well as in medieval literature. But it mattered greatly that he did not simply dismiss my callow efforts but treated them seriously and was willing to argue with me about them. He believed in argument and greatly enjoyed it."

Always one of the things I've most admired about Lewis.

• p. 116: "The reliance on memory, with its capacity for creative error, belongs to an older world of scholarship; the unreferenced misrecollection would never do in a modern academic article, but it does not distort Shakespeare’s meaning, and it makes Lewis’s point very aptly."

Spearing is referencing Lewis's misquoting Caliban from The Tempest, and I'm just noting this for what used to pass muster for world-class scholars.

• p. 116: "I should explain that his appointment to the new Cambridge chair had aroused some controversy, with the loudest objectors being acolytes of Dr F.R. Leavis, those who sat in the front row at Leavis’s lectures, vigorously nodding at his assertions and laughing sycophantically at his sarcasms. They saw Lewis as representative of all that was Oxonian, retrograde, and dead in English studies, and there was a widespread [mistaken] assumption that he and Leavis were deadly enemies."

This quote hits a bit closer to home, as I once wrote an article explaining that one reason why Tolkien, F. P. Wilson, and Lord David Cecil all nominated E. M. Forster for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 was to smooth along the election of C. S. Lewis to his Cambridge chair that same year. Wish I had known this tidbit about the Leavisites back then, although Spearing reports that, although both Lewis and Leavis were temperamentally very different, 

• "the two distinguished men shared a deeply traditionalist view of the nature of English studies, one that saw English literature as something quite different from literature in English" (116).

Again, oh yes .... and that observation is very much to point in my research on Lewis's contributions to the Modern Alliterative Revival.

-------------------

**Spearing, A. C. "C. S. Lewis as a Research Supervisor." Journal of Inklings Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2022, pp. 110-117.