Letters of C. S. Lewis

by C. S. Lewis

  That Arthur’s visit would have this character was something all too obvious to Jack: he hinted delicately at the ‘obstacle’ of his father’s temperament, and the visit never took place.

  In December 1916 Jack went to Oxford to sit for a classical scholarship: passed over by New College, he was elected to an open scholarship by University. The full list of awards, published in The Times a few days later, included the names of Alfred C. Harwood and Arthur Owen Barfield: these two, elected to classical scholarships at Christ Church and Wadham respectively, were to be for the rest of Jack’s life among his most intimate personal friends.

  The prospects offered by war-time Oxford were, of course, limited and determined by the imminence of military service for most undergraduates: there were few men in residence, and arrangements were flexible. It was proposed that Jack should take Responsions in March and come up for the Trinity Term, joining the Oxford O.T.C.: this, it was suggested, offered him the best chance of a commission. And so, after further coaching at Bookham and a visit home, Jack matriculated, signed his name in the College book, and began his University career on 28 April 1917.

  It is noteworthy that in the circumstances of the time he was allowed to come into residence, having in the event failed the Responsions examination that Easter: one of his first concerns at Oxford was to find a coach and work harder at the elements of mathematics, with a view to another attempt. In fact, he never did pass the examination, being exempted from it later on by virtue of his military service. In this he was fortunate, for I do not believe that at any stage in his career he could have passed an examination of any kind in elementary mathematics: a view with which he himself agreed, when I put it to him many years later.

  Before one full term was out, his papers came through, and Jack found himself a soldier, having crammed into those first few weeks at Oxford not only his unsuccessful work for Responsions and his O.T.C. training but also a good deal of miscellaneous reading, most of this (as recorded in his pocket-book) being characteristically a matter of poetry and romance. Joining the army was less of a break for him than for some others, since the cadet battalion to which he was drafted was billeted in Keble: he was able to keep in touch with his friends and even (for a time) to spend his week-ends in his own college.

  Towards army life in war-time, his final attitude—as expressed in Surprised by Joy—was notably positive; and in these first days of initial training, his letters home conveyed more exhilaration than distress. It was during this period that a relationship first began that had a huge and determining effect upon the pattern of his subsequent life. Among the cadets at Keble, he found a few who were congenial company: one of them was E. F. C. (‘Paddy’) Moore, with whom he shared a room by alphabetic accident. In August, he had a couple of days’ leave at home, and I had the misfortune to miss him by a few days: the next weekend he spent with Moore and his mother. On 25 September, Jack was commissioned in the 3rd Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry and given a month’s leave: he chose the same society for the first part of this leave, not coming home until 12 October. My father’s pocket-book contains a wry note of this order of priorities: the situation did not reach full development until much later, but its character may have been apparent already.

  I do not wish to dwell upon the barriers that existed between Jack and my father, nor to exaggerate their importance in connection with Jack’s subsequent involvement with Mrs Moore and her affairs. These barriers were not only of a purely personal kind: between Ireland and England there stood in those days a kind of iron curtain of misunderstanding. There was no conscription in Ireland, no rationing, no shortages (as far as I could see) of any kind: the war was a very remote thing, merely a topic of conversation unless one had relatives fighting in France. I never went on leave without getting an eerie feeling that I had somehow or other been jolted back into 1913. Into this remote atmosphere, Jack despatched on 15 November a telegram—one that would have made it clear to anyone in England that he was on the eve of embarkation for overseas service. My father simply wired back that he could not understand the telegram, and asked for leisured explanations: he made no attempt to keep the rendezvous in Bristol—proposed clearly enough by Jack—for what might well have been a last meeting, and Jack had to sail for France and the war without seeing him again.

  This must have been felt as a rebuff, though it was probably due to a genuine misunderstanding, a failure in ‘communication’. But the same thing happened again much more seriously, seven months later. Jack reached the front line on his nineteenth birthday, 29 November 1917: after an initial spell in the trenches and a short illness, he was among those who faced in March the final German attack on the Western Front, and in April he was wounded. I was able to visit him at once in hospital, and I still recall my overwhelming relief when I found him sitting up in bed and greeting me with a cheerful ‘Hullo, I didn’t know you A.S.C. people got as far up the line as this!’

  His wounds were not serious, but he was sent home to recuperate in London, having heard a little earlier that Mrs Moore’s son was missing and believed dead; and from the hospital in Endsleigh Gardens he wrote home, cheerfully but with his first frank expression of homesickness, begging his father to come and visit him.

  One would have thought it impossible for any father to resist an appeal of this kind, coming at such a moment. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects: in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore as to a mother, seeking there the affection which was apparently denied him at home.

  There was no breach between Jack and his father: things remained, outwardly, as they had been. But after this, ‘Little Lea’ lost its importance to Jack, and soon he was to write in his diary of ‘coming home’ in reference to the journey from his father’s house to Oxford.

  Before he was fit for any further service in France, the war was over; and after a certain amount of shifting around from one army camp to another, he was demobilized earlier than we had expected. I was at home on leave myself, not expecting to see him, when on 27 December 1918 he unexpectedly arrived, fit and free: in spite of all the stresses and tensions just mentioned it was a joyful reunion on all sides, a recovery of old days, the first occasion moreover on which I had champagne at home.

  Within a month he was back at Oxford, and had embarked there upon a pattern of life that was to remain in many respects unaltered for the rest of his days. As such things are reckoned he had ‘a successful career’; and in his progress from undergraduate brilliance through a double first to a fellowship and finally a professor’s chair, in his world-wide celebrity as a writer on literary and religious subjects alike, there might appear to be an inevitable, even an effortless working-out of the destiny foreseen by Kirkpatrick.

  My own contribution to the world’s understanding of my brother must be limited: I do not propose in this memoir to give any full account of his work, and still less any evaluation of it. I offer only my own memories of Jack, as man, friend, and brother: and if these memories are to be useful to those who hope to understand his mind and his work, there must be no concealment of the difficulties under which he worked, the patterns of stress and tension that determined many aspects of his life.

  There was, indeed, something natural and effortless about his strictly academic and literary work: Jack was one of those rare and fortunate people whose idea of recreation overlaps and even coincides with their necessary work. It was no matter of surprise that he should take a First in Honour Mods (1920), a First in Greats (1922), and a First in English (1923), or that he should win the Chancellor’s Prize for an English Essay. But even for a scholar of his ability and achievement, it was then no swift and easy matter to embark successfully upon an academic career. Immediately after taking Greats, he sat for
a Fellowship by Examination at Magdalen: before this, he had looked into the possibility of a classical lectureship at Reading: later on, he applied for Fellowships at Trinity and St John’s. For all these posts, Jack saw other men chosen; and there were times during this period of uncertainty when he tended towards despair of any academic or literary success.

  For the fact that he persevered, some credit must be given to the support—both moral and material—given by his own College and by his father. The authorities at Univ. had faith in him, and extended his original scholarship for a fourth year, spent very congenially in reading for the English School: his early reading gave him a flying start here, and academic affairs were then tending in a direction that made a double First of this particular pattern a very formidable qualification indeed. And in the end it was his own College that first offered him a post—a very minor post, certainly, but still a beginning: it was with considerable relief that Jack polished up his Greats reading and began his tutorial work in October 1924.

  This was strictly a temporary post, covering a single year’s absence in America of one of the Fellows. Next Spring, it was announced that Magdalen proposed to make an election to a Fellowship in English. The competition seemed likely to be severe, and Jack applied listlessly, with little hope of success. The College elected him, nominally for five years: in fact, this appointment filled the bulk of his working life, from June 1925 until in 1954 he left Oxford to take up a professor’s chair at Cambridge.

  And so, after a long and discouraging struggle, Jack managed to fight his way into the apparently impregnable fortress which he had once described as ‘the real Oxford’. Almost his first action was to write to his father in deep gratitude for six years of generous support. As I have hinted already, there was some degree of estrangement between them—though never any frank ill-feeling—and a certain amount of gloom and stress attended Jack’s visits to ‘Little Lea’: nevertheless, my father had kept his promise made in 1923 of three years’ further support for Jack at Oxford, even though he knew that there was some risk of failure, and that it would then be no easy matter for Jack to launch himself in some totally new career at the age of 28 or so.

  The stress occasioned by this limited family estrangement was only intermittent. But there was a further source of stress and difficulty in Jack’s life, continuous, long-lasting, and to some degree self-inflicted. I have already indicated how during the war Jack started to display a marked preference for Mrs Moore’s company, rather than his father’s: afterwards at Oxford this relationship developed much more strongly. Mrs Moore had lost her son; Jack had many years earlier lost his mother and now his father too seemed to have failed him emotionally. He may have felt also some sense of responsibility, a duty perhaps of keeping some war-time promise made to Paddy Moore. Be that as it may, Jack now embarked upon a relationship with Mrs Moore which was almost of son and mother; and as soon as his first year as an undergraduate was over, instead of moving from college into lodgings, he set up a joint ménage with her and her daughter Maureen. Having once embarked on this relationship with Mrs Moore, it was not in Jack’s nature later to abandon her, and the ménage in fact continued in existence until her death in 1951; during this period Jack commonly referred to Mrs Moore as ‘my mother’—not always with any explicit indication that the relationship was conventional and adoptive.

  The thing most puzzling to myself and to Jack’s friends was Mrs Moore’s extreme unsuitability as a companion for him. She was a woman of very limited mind, and notably domineering and possessive by temperament. She cut down to a minimum his visits to his father, interfered constantly with his work, and imposed upon him a heavy burden of minor domestic tasks. In twenty years I never saw a book in her hands; her conversation was chiefly about herself, and was otherwise a matter of ill-informed dogmatism: her mind was of a type that he found barely tolerable elsewhere. The whole business had to be concealed from my father of course, which widened the rift between him and Jack; and since an allowance calculated to suit a bachelor living in college was by no means enough for a householder, Jack found himself miserably poor. Nevertheless he continued in this restrictive and distracting servitude for many of his most fruitful years, suffering the worries and expense of repeated moves, until in 1930 we all settled at The Kilns, Headington Quarry.

  I dwell on this rather unhappy business with some regret, but it was one of the central and determining circumstances in Jack’s life. He hinted at it, darkly, in Surprised by Joy, and it is reflected with painful clarity in various passages in his books; the stress and gloom that it often caused him must not be played down.

  On the other hand, it would be wildly misleading to suggest that my brother lived the life of a solitary and embittered recluse. The case was quite otherwise. As all his friends will bear witness, he was a man with an outstanding gift for pastime with good company, for laughter and the love of friends—a gift which found full scope in any number of holidays and walking tours, the joyous character of his response to these being well conveyed in his letters. He had, indeed, a remarkable talent for friendship, particularly for friendship of an uproarious kind, masculine and argumentative but never quarrelsome.

  In this connection I must say something of the Inklings, a famous and heroic gathering, one that has already passed into literary legend. Properly speaking it was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections—unless one counts it as a rule that we met in Jack’s rooms at Magdalen every Thursday evening after dinner. Proceedings neither began nor terminated at any fixed hour, though there was a tacit agreement that ten-thirty was as late as one could decently arrive. From time to time we added to our original number, but without formalities: someone would suggest that Jones be asked to come in of a Thursday, and there could be either general agreement, or else a perceptible lack of enthusiasm and a dropping of the matter. Usually there was agreement, since we all knew the type of man we wanted or did not want.

  The ritual of an Inklings was unvarying. When half a dozen or so had arrived, tea would be produced, and then when pipes were well alight Jack would say, ‘Well, has nobody got anything to read us?’ Out would come a manuscript, and we would settle down to sit in judgement upon it—real unbiased judgement, too, since we were no mutual admiration society: praise for good work was unstinted, but censure for bad work—or even not-so-good work—was often brutally frank. To read to the Inklings was a formidable ordeal, and I can still remember the fear with which I offered the first chapter of my first book—and my delight, too, at its reception.

  To indicate the content of those evenings, let me look forward to 1946, a vintage year. At most of the meetings during that year we had a chapter from Tolkien’s ‘new Hobbit’, as we called it—the great work later published as The Lord of the Rings. My diary records in October of that year ‘a long argument on the ethics of cannibalism’; in November, that ‘Roy Campbell read us his translations of a couple of Spanish poems’, and ‘John Wain won an outstanding bet by reading a chapter of Irene Iddlesleigh without a smile’; and of the next meeting, that ‘David (Cecil) read a chapter of his forthcoming book on Gray’. In February 1949 we talked of red-brick universities; from where the talk drifted by channels which I have forgotten, to ‘torture, Tertullian, bores, the contractual theory of mediaeval kingship, and odd place-names’.

  Sometimes, though not often, it would happen that no one had anything to read to us. On these occasions the fun would be riotous, with Jack at the top of his form and enjoying every minute—‘no sound delights me more’, he once said, ‘than male laughter’. At the Inklings his talk was an outpouring of wit, nonsense, whimsy, dialectical swordplay, and pungent judgement such as I have rarely heard equalled—no mere show put on for the occasion, either, since it was often quite as brilliant when he and I were alone together.

  During the war years, and the even harder years after 1945, the routine would sometimes be varied sligh
tly and Jack would give us all a cold supper in his rooms—a thing made possible by the great generosity of his many American admirers, whose tributes to him included many noble parcels of food. And there was also another ritual gathering, subsidiary to the Inklings proper: the same company used to meet for an hour or so before lunch every Tuesday at the Eagle and Child in St Giles’, better known as the Bird and Baby. These gatherings must have attained a certain notoriety, for in a detective novel of the period a character is made to say ‘It must be Tuesday—there’s Lewis going into the Bird’.

  In his Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, Jack gave a lively and moving account of what this circle meant to him, with particular reference to one of the richest and most fruitful friendships of his life. For me to say anything further of Charles Williams in this context would be an unnecessary impertinence.