While their talents weren’t of the caliber of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s, Lewis and Tolkien were as susceptible to this template of literary friendship as anyone; both certainly had thought of themselves as poets rather than novelists in their youth. Furthermore, Lewis had been calling himself a “Romantic” since long before he met Tolkien. He had devoured the poetry of Shelley and Keats as a boy. After pooh-poohing Wordsworth through his youth, Lewis came to admire and identify with the poet in his twenties; when asked late in life to list the ten books that had most influenced him, Lewis included The Prelude, Wordsworth’s epic, autobiographical poem (addressed, naturally, to Coleridge).
Like Lewis, Wordsworth looked back on a youth when “meadow, grove, and stream, / The earth, and every common sight” inspired a kind of ecstasy, “the glory and the freshness of a dream,” only to realize that this capacity had withered in adulthood: “there hath past away a glory from the earth.” Eventually, Lewis found the solution to what he called his “Wordsworthian predicament” in religion, and he believed that the author of The Prelude would have found renewal in Christianity, too, “if only he could have believed it.” Even the title of Lewis’s autobiography, Surprised by Joy, is taken from a Wordsworth sonnet.
In other aspects, however, Lewis played Coleridge to Tolkien’s Wordsworth. He was a great talker — if not so great as Coleridge, who bedazzled everyone who heard him — and he had a tendency to monopolize conversations. (Tolkien, like Wordsworth, was the more reserved and saturnine of the pair.) The popularity of Lewis as an Oxford lecturer, radio essayist, and apologist paralleled Coleridge’s success during his occasional stints as a public speaker; “the people here absolutely consume me,” Coleridge complained to a friend after a bequest enabled him to resign a position as a minister. Both Lewis and Coleridge cared little for clothes and their own appearance, and both relished herculean walks that would have exhausted mere mortals; Coleridge was known to cover forty miles in a day without thinking much of it.
Coleridge, like Lewis, was a precipitator, very keen on pulling groups of like-minded friends together to see what happened, and he had a knack for caricature and social satire that he sometimes exercised to his own disadvantage. And while Coleridge never went through a period of serious religious doubt (he was always a passionate Christian, if often an unconventional one), he shared Lewis’s conviction that the splendors of nature must necessarily point toward something beyond it. “My mind,” he wrote to a friend, “feels as if it ached to behold & know something great — something one & indivisible — and it is only in the faith of this that rocks or waterfalls, mountains or caverns give me the sense of sublimity or majesty! — But in this faith all things counterfeit infinity!”
Above all, Coleridge was an enthusiast; he devoted himself to encouraging and celebrating Wordsworth when his friend was still a relatively untried poet with a lesser reputation. Lewis tirelessly coaxed Tolkien to finish and publish his writings; Tolkien, like Wordsworth, tended to fuss interminably over small imperfections and would have kept much of his work to himself if not prodded to let it go. As it was, The Prelude (which Wordsworth originally conceived of as an introduction to the great work Coleridge expected of him — the great work itself, to be called The Recluse, he never completed) was not published until after Wordsworth’s death. Tolkien described himself as “a notorious beginner of enterprises and non-finisher,” and blamed this on the difficulty he had in concentrating. Yet he could spend days fretting over the astronomical details in The Lord of the Rings, worrying about getting the phases of the moon just right instead of thinking about how to get to the next scene. If the result feels more persuasive because of his meticulousness, it’s only due to Lewis’s nagging that we have an end product at all.
Coleridge is probably the greatest “non-finisher” in English literature, more famous, perhaps, for what he didn’t do (complete “Kubla Khan” or “Christabel”) than for what he did. This is an occupational hazard for artists whose efforts are fueled exclusively by gusts of creative inspiration; gusts are by definition brief. In Coleridge’s case, his changeable nature was compounded by opium addiction, a habit he fell into partly for medical reasons (laudanum was routinely prescribed by physicians in those days) and partly to escape from an unhappy marriage. The drug ruined his life, aggravating all the traits that made him uniquely exasperating even to his best friends. “He talks very much like an angel,” said one of the poet’s patrons toward the end, “and he does nothing at all.” Opium magnified Coleridge’s tendency toward self-pity and kept him from dealing sensibly with what he regarded as the great torments of his later years: his unrequited love for Wordsworth’s sister-in-law and his eventual estrangement from Wordsworth.
Finishing certainly wasn’t Lewis’s problem; considering the incessant demands and disruptions of his domestic situation, he was superhumanly productive, even during the worst days of Mrs. Moore’s decline. He wrote all seven of the Narnia books in a little over two years. During the same period he was hospitalized with a streptococcal infection (the one attributed by his doctor to exhaustion) and coped with a crisis in Mrs. Moore’s health that required moving her to a nursing home. He handled that task alone; Warnie, as was his wont when the going got tough, was off recovering from one of his inopportune alcoholic binges.
Lewis dealt with all this on top of the regular duties of an Oxford tutor. Over the previous two decades, he had produced The Allegory of Love, the three science-fiction novels known as the “Space Trilogy,” several books of apologetics and the radio talks that spawned them, and many articles and (often unsigned) reviews for newspapers and other popular publications. Tolkien, by contrast, had published only The Hobbit, which was a success — but not on the level of, say, Mere Christianity — and he kept getting stuck in the midsection of The Lord of the Rings. The two of them had cooked up a scheme in the early 1930s to write a “thriller” apiece (Lewis picked space travel as his theme; Tolkien’s was time travel), and whereas Lewis had fulfilled the plan in triplicate, Tolkien had only “a fragment” of a novel to show for himself.
This, the two men’s various biographers agree, bothered Tolkien. That is the problem with literary friendships: the commonalities that foster them can also lead to comparison, competition, friction. The fastidious Tolkien was further annoyed by Lewis’s authorial sloppiness, his uncorrected mistakes and inconsistencies, which were, like many of Coleridge’s faults, the result of an endearingly wholehearted forward momentum that blithely swept over the sort of minor problems that would inevitably trip up Tolkien.