The opening greeting, “My Dear Eliot,” from the pen of C.S. Lewis may not seem particularly notable, but that simple yet warm greeting from Lewis to Eliot in several letters from 1959 to 1960 was an achievement that took decades. Since the beginning of their respective careers there had been an entrenched coolness. But as they gathered in 1959, summoned by Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, to serve on the Committee to Revise the Psalter, impressions changed, and old prejudices evaporated as both men found that they held much in common. It appears that while they worked on the committee to preserve much of the Coverdale translation, which they both loved deeply, the personal gulf between the men was bridged. Soon the men were meeting together with their wives over lunch. Lewis, ever the accumulator of friends that differed from him greatly, made his peace with Eliot, remarking to Walter Hooper, “You know that I never cared for Eliot’s poetry and criticism, but when we met I loved him at once.” There is no noted change in Lewis’s attitude toward Eliot’s work, but he did find the man behind the words and counted him in the end as a friend.
It began with the youthful, brash Lewis and his endeavors to become a first-rate poet. However, he watched as Eliot’s poetry and fame rapidly spread throughout the country, reaching new heights upon the publication of his masterpiece, “The Waste Land” (1922), while Lewis’s own poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926) received little to no attention. Naturally, some have proposed that Lewis’ disgust can be credited to jealousy. J.R.R. Tolkien balked at such notions, writing in a 1964 letter that any idea of Lewis allowing envy to sway his literary opinions was “a grotesque calumny.” Tolkien continues, stating that “it is possible to dislike Eliot with some intensity even if one has no aspirations to poetic laurels oneself.” Unlike Tolkien, Lewis did carry such desires early in his career. Yet the complexities of Lewis and his love for language allow for genuine criticisms against Eliot’s modernism, which Tolkien was privy to in Oxford, and for envy to have been at the most an early underlying influence. By 1926, Lewis had read enough of Eliot’s poetry to conclude it a great waste and devised a prank against Eliot that involved submitting mock-modernist poetry to The Criterion, edited by Eliot; this prank eventually went nowhere.
Lewis, however, was just getting started on his vendetta against the modernist’s poets, particularly Eliot. In the years between Lewis’s scheming prank and The Pilgrims Regress (1933), both Eliot and he would enter the Anglican church—Eliot in 1927 and Lewis in 1931. These changes to both men inspired no compassion in Lewis as his suspicions of Eliot’s Anglo-Catholicism and modernist literary convictions would turn slightly nasty in The Pilgrims Regress. Two characters within the work, “Neo-Classical” and “Neo-Angular,” are clear representations of Eliot in a rather dark light. Lewis added an afterword to the book ten years later reflecting on a frustration at the time with “the American ‘Humanists’, the Neo-Scholastics, and some who wrote for the The Criterion.” Further clarity was added considering his 1933 letter to Dymer‘s publisher regarding one of the chief ridicules in the book as none other than T.S. Eliot.
The crux of Lewis’s contempt for Eliot regarded a statement from Eliot’s essay on John Milton where Eliot proposed, “the only jury of judgement is that of the ablest poetical practitioners of my own time.” For Lewis there seemed no greater injustice. He would attack in A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942) the idea of a jury of modern poets; such a self-appointed inner circle excludes many good readers. The small chorus chanting envy as Lewis’s main motive here have missed the point. His failures as a poet rankled little by this point in his career, but Eliot’s insular tribunal cuts off many who read and love poetry. His chapter attacking Eliot’s idea in A Preface to Paradise Lost would earn him correspondence with Eliot. He explained in a letter dated 1943 to Eliot regarding his criticisms, “I hope the fact that I find myself often contradicting you in print gives no offence: it is a kind of tribute to you–whenever I fall foul of some wide-spread contemporary view about literature I always seem to find that you have expressed it most clearly. One aims at the officers first in meeting an attack!”
Lewis and Eliot’s mutual friend, Charles Williams, had long been trying to get the two to meet, and Lewis references Williams’s “threats” in this letter. In 1945, just a few short months before Williams’ death, the trio finally gathered for lunch. It was unsuccessful. Any chance of a reconciliation was further harmed after the death of Williams: Lewis attempted to publish a volume of essays honoring his friend with the profits going to Mrs. Williams, and he solicited a contribution from Eliot, knowing that his name would give the volume greater traction. Despite numerous attempts, Lewis could not get an honest commitment or any materials from Eliot for the project. He would remark to Dorothy L. Sayers that Eliot was “one of these poets (in the worst sense of the word).” The volume would eventually go on without Eliot’s involvement, and Lewis wrote telling Eliot he hoped that he would find another way of honoring their mutual friend. Eliot did in fact find a way with his employer, the publisher Faber and Faber, reprinting the works of Williams. The decade would close with a lasting silence between the two.
As the 1950s continued Lewis would slowly turn his attention back to poetry again just as his Narnia series was concluding. This return to poetry would bring Eliot and the poison of modern poetry back to his mind. The opening lines in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) in particular haunted Lewis throughout his life. The brief but condemned section is “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” Lewis was disgusted by this picture, remarking in a letter to Katharine Farrer in 1954 that such an evening had never been seen by anyone and was a “locus classicus” (classic example) belittling of nature. Lewis would mock Eliot’s stanza from Prufrock in his own poem, “A Confession,” writing, “For twenty years I’ve stared my level best / To see if evening–any / evening–would suggest / A patient etherized upon a table; In vain. I simply wasn’t able.” Upon taking the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954, Lewis gave his key address defending his great love, old poetry, from the rise of modern poetry. In his address, Lewis recalled a recent symposium on Eliot’s short poem, “A Cooking Egg,” in which seven professors could not agree on the poem’s meaning. This was the tragic state of the world and its disgusting new poetry, of which Eliot was one of its chief figures.
However, just a few short years later, Lewis and Eliot would gather to dutifully serve their Archbishop and would come away with a friendship. Lewis would walk away from this encounter with what he later described to Hooper as a deep love for Eliot. Suspicions faded and Lewis met the man not the critic. Lunches with wives took place, letters were sent with warm and kind greetings—gone were the days of aiming at the officers in an attack. Soon an opportunity would appear for Eliot to aid his friend. While serving as editor at Faber and Faber, Eliot received a manuscript under a pseudonym. Knowing his friend and the death of Lewis’s wife, Joy, Eliot easily guessed the author. He was deeply moved by the manuscript that would become A Grief Observed (1961). Eliot not only published it but offered suggestions for a different pseudonym to honor the author’s wish to remain anonymous.
Lewis did love Eliot after their time together working on the psalter, and their friendship would hold until Lewis’s death in 1963, yet he refused to surrender his arguments against modern poetry. He continued this polemic, though with greater gentleness than when he was young, in An Experiment on Criticism (1961), outlining the dangers of modern poetry, which included his new friend, Eliot. Their differences as claimed by Lewis in A Preface to Paradise Lost do seem delicate and for some rather trivial now. One does wonder what might have happened if Williams could have secured an understanding and possible friendship before the pair’s work on the psalter. Lewis, ever the charitable dissenter, seemed to collect friends for the art of debate and disagreement, but he took a long time to come around to Eliot. What little role envy may have played in the beginning disappeared quickly. There were certainly misunderstandings, too, but both their differences and their eventual friendship flowed from matters of the heart, and they discovered that love does indeed cover a multitude of sins.
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