Week 3: Fallow/Flowering

Lewis was a phenomenal—and phenomenally successful—novelist, scholar, and public intellectual. But his remarkable career began in failure.

I promised, at the start of this newsletter, a mix of thematic reflection and literary analysis. The reader may well ask at this point if we will ever move beyond biographical musings. The answer to that is: yes, we will, I promise. In these early weeks, as I follow Jack’s youth and academic career, I've found our lives intersecting in thought-provoking ways. Moreover, until 1933 (incidentally, more than halfway through his life), Jack didn’t publish much of literary interest. His only publications before that point were two volumes of poetry (largely bad) and a handful of reviews.

And that lack of literary production is what I want to discuss with you this week. So with apologies to those of you hoping for close reading, let’s talk about C. S. Lewis: failed poet and academic job-seeker.

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On getting into bed I was attacked by a series of gloomy thoughts about professional and literary failure - what Barfield calls “one of those moments when one is afraid that one may not be a great man after all.” (All My Road 194)

So wrote Lewis in his diary on 9 February 1923. It’s one of many instances in his diary, which he kept from 1922 to 1927, when he expresses dejection over failures to obtain a faculty position at Oxford or to publish his poetry.

The self-aggrandisement of that particular form of expression (“one may not be a great man after all”) made me smile. Lewis was not in any sense a humble young man; his letters exude near-absolute confidence in his own intellect, judgment, and opinions. Yet, in my own way, I fully understand how he feels.

When I applied to graduate programs, I was warned that the culture of academia would attempt to impose upon me a very narrow paradigm of success: Successful graduate students publish articles and go on to obtain tenure-track jobs; anything else is somehow a failure. Now, this is less true today than it was a generation ago. But it’s still good advice.

I had the excellent fortune to do my PhD at the University of Notre Dame, where students and faculty were largely encouraging of graduates who pursued careers outside of academia. Even so, I have watched myself over the past eight years slowly absorb that equation: Success = Tenure-track Academic Job. To achieve that job, one must publish early and often, teach as much as possible, and develop a public profile. It’s assumed somehow that, if you’ve been accepted to a competitive program, you’re a “great man” in the making. You’ll write your dissertation, publish it promptly, make valuable contributions to your field, develop exciting new pedagogical approaches, and claim that much coveted academic job reasonably promptly.

So far, by that narrow standard of success, I’m abjectly failing. I’ve been on the job market for five years. I’ve had interviews, even campus visits, but so far, no job.

“One is afraid that one may not be a great man after all.”

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All that to say, I feel a great deal of sympathy when I read about Jack’s struggles to obtain work. Indeed, while his academic world was far smaller than ours today, he had the misfortune to be looking for work at the same time as every other young man who had fought in the war. It was an unusually competitive market. His peers were becoming journalists or secondary-school teachers, because the competition for university positions was so fierce—we would call that today “going alt-ac.”

Jack lingered in Oxford after his scholarship ran out in 1922, cramming a three-year English degree into the space of a single year, and then, from 1923 to 1925, cobbling together tutorials while desperately applying for every fellowship that became available. He was fortunate, in that his father was willing and able to support him during this time. The letter he writes to his father after obtaining the Magdalen fellowship, dated 26 May 1925, is really moving: “let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous support, extended over six years, which alone has enabled me to hang on till this” (Letters I.642).

The catch was that Albert Lewis apparently did not know that his son was keeping house with Janie Moore, the mother of Jack’s friend Paddy Moore who had died in the war, and her daughter Maureen. Jack went to great lengths to keep this relationship from his father, who did not approve of Mrs. Moore. Jack’s allowance was enough to support a single young man living in college, but not enough to support an entire household. So not only was he anxious about his future as a scholar: he was experiencing considerable financial precarity.

His desperation and relief are clear in that letter to his father. He recalls his interview with the President of Magdalen College, who asked “‘would I be prepared, in addition to the English pupils, to help with the philosophy.’” Jack adds, “I need hardly say that I would have agreed to coach a troupe of performing bagbirds in the quadrangle: but I looked very wise and thought over all his points and I hope let no subservience appear” (Letters I.645).

Yet even as this new position alleviated Jack’s financial concerns, he was forced to confront the demoralising failure of his poetic career.

Jack managed to publish two volumes of poetry at the beginning of his career: Spirits in Bondage in 1919 and the long poem Dymer in 1926. Both received some praise when they appeared; neither were widely read. As Walter Hooper puts it, Dymer “had many favourable reviews, but few readers” (All My Road 425).

In a letter to his dear friend Arthur Greeves, Jack offers this retrospective on his poetic career:

From the age of sixteen onwards I had one single ambition, from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on wh. I really & deliberately staked my whole contentment: and I recognise myself as having unmistakably failed in it. (Letters I. 925)

Jack seems to have believed he failed because his romantic, formal verse differed too greatly from modern poetic taste, which is probably fair. With the benefit of historical distance, we might add that he failed because he wasn’t a particularly good poet. Though perhaps that judgment shows that I, too, have fallen under the pernicious influence of “moderns” like T. S. Eliot. (Some other week I will write about Jack’s rancorous parasocial relationship with Eliot’s poetry, and the circuitous path which decades later led the two men to form a more cordial connection.)

Whatever the case, Jack gave up on his dream of writing poetry. He didn’t publish his first novel until The Pilgrim’s Regress in 1933, and he didn’t reach the height of his intellectual productivity until 1938, which saw the publication of Out of the Silent Planet. From then on, he published a book nearly every year, and sometimes two.

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Observing these false starts and the slow development of Lewis’ career makes me contemplate two issues, one cultural and the other personal.

On a cultural level, within academia and without, I note how we valorise early career productivity. In academia, we place great emphasis on promptly obtaining a job and publishing the first book. This wasn’t true a generation or two ago. It wasn’t unusual for scholars to take a decade after their doctorate to publish their first monograph—and sometimes that monograph would be wholly different from their doctoral work. In Jack’s case, his first academic book is The Allegory of Love, which he begins to work on in 1928 and publishes in 1936—11 years after obtaining his Magdalen fellowship.

Of course, academia is more competitive these days, and we must distinguish ourselves somehow. But that doesn’t quite answer the question: is the emphasis on productivity in response to competition taking something away from scholars’ intellectual development?

And more broadly, I think of my former students at Notre Dame, who had all worked so hard for a substantial proportion of their lives to be accepted by a top university. They were bright and earnest and chronically stressed. Jean Twenge notes in her amazing book iGen that relative to Millennials, Gen Z are more likely to desire a ‘practical,’ stable career and less likely to choose a career primarily because it allows them to pursue their passions. They’re also more willing to work overtime, apparently. Her findings consistently affirm my anecdotal observations of my hard-working, high-achieving students. (You can find a nice summary of Twenge’s research in this Atlantic piece.)

We might see this as a natural response to an uncertain job market—just like the academic’s rush to produce monograph after monograph is a natural response to that tiresome mantra “publish or perish.” We can’t wish these forces away.

But, for whatever it’s worth, we can imagine alternatives. We can question the degree to which we valorise early career productivity. And we can tell young people the truth: that no matter how hard you work, you may find yourself muddling along for a while. You may take some time to find your vocation. You may need to grow and change. And that’s ok.

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Which brings us to the personal issue: how do we respond, when we endure fallow periods? How do we respond to the sense of failure?

Jack’s statement above about his failure as a writer comes from a letter written to Arthur Greeves on 18 August 1930, and as I read it, I had that uncomfortable feeling of being too keenly perceived. '

It’s an odd letter. Greeves had apparently written asking for reassurance after receiving harsh criticism of a piece of writing. Jack does not provide that reassurance. Instead, he waxes eloquent on the spiritual challenges of ambition.

The side of me which longs, not to write, for no one can stop us doing that, but to be approved as a writer, is not the side of us that is really worth much. And depend upon it, unless God has abandoned us, he will find means to cauterise that side somehow or other…. And honestly, the being cured, with all the pain, has pleasure too: one creeps home, tired and bruised, into a state of mind that is really restful, when all ones ambitions have been given up. Then one can really for the first time say ‘Thy Kingdom come’: for in that Kingdom there will be no preeminences and a man must have reached the stage of not caring two straws about his own status before he can enter it. (Letters I.926)

I think one can sympathise with this advice, even without any belief in God. The desire to be exceptional—to be “a great man,” as Jack puts it elsewhere—can be a heavy burden. When we set it aside, we can focus instead on the work we are inwardly compelled to do, rather than what we feel we ought to do to impress others.

This newsletter is one such enterprise for me. I’ve been nervous to share this project with other academics, because I worry that it will be read as unprofessional, and perhaps even close off employment opportunities. C. S. Lewis is, in some circles, not considered a very reputable subject for academic research. But so far, it’s been a source of delight and inspiration. I’m finding the rhythm of steady reading and writing wonderfully grounding, as I contemplate what my next chapter holds.

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Jack kept a regular diary from 1922 to 1927. His last entry concludes with a question: “Is there never to be any peace or comfort?” (All My Road 457). On the next page, his editor, Walter Hooper, answers for us: “There was to be much peace and comfort…. The literary career, which he had already begun to combine with his academic one, blossomed unfalteringly and books of all sorts poured from his pen” (458).

The danger of using Jack as an object lesson for those in the midst of career struggles is that his story ends so neatly. Not only does he secure a much-longed-for fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1925 and thereby commence a secure academic career; not only does he succeed as both a writer of fiction and a public intellectual; but he also becomes so famous that we actually read his poetry as well!

It’s the sort of story that’s easy to like: Man learns requisite humility, succeeds beyond wildest dreams.

But I like to end in the middle. On 17 October 1922, he wrote:

From lunch till tea time I worked at an essay on Troilus. My prose style is really abominable, and between poetry and work I suppose I shall never learn to improve it. (121)

That line makes me smile every time I read it, because I can think of few writers with a more lucid prose style than C. S. Lewis. But at 23 years of age, he held out no hope of such an achievement.

It’s marvellous to think that so few of us really know what gifts we will give the world. We are all trapped in the middle of our individual stories, uncertain how they will unfold. But that uncertainty is a space of possibility. All we can ever do is take the next step and find out where it leads.

May the road rise up to meet you this week,

Sarah