C. S. Lewis – A Life

by Alister McGrath

  Lewis duly turned up wearing this excessively formal attire. To his embarrassment, everyone else turned out to be wearing the much less formal dinner jacket and black tie. But Lewis made a good impression, despite his unorthodox garb. A rumour reached him that there were only two serious candidates in the race: he was one of them; the other was another Irishman, John Bryson.

  On the following Saturday, Lewis happened to meet the president of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren, in the street, and exchanged a few words with him. On Monday, Warren wrote to Lewis, asking to see him the next morning. It was, Warren declared, “most important.” Lewis was worried: had something gone wrong? Had they discovered something about him that had sunk his chances?

  Apprehensive, Lewis arrived at the president’s lodgings at Magdalen. Warren informed him that they would be making the election the following morning. Lewis was their preferred candidate, and he wished to check that Lewis fully understood what the duties and responsibilities of a fellow were. Most important, he wanted to ensure that Lewis would be willing to teach philosophy as well as English. Hugely relieved, Lewis assured him that this would indeed be the case. That was it. Warren indicated that the meeting was over, and asked Lewis to be sure he was available to be contacted by telephone at University College the following afternoon.

  The call came through. Lewis made the short walk to Magdalen, where Warren informed him that he had been elected. He would receive a salary of £500, rooms in college, a dining allowance, and a pension. The appointment was for five years initially, and if things worked out well, it would be renewed.254 Lewis rushed to the post office and sent a telegram to his father: “Elected Fellow Magdalen. Jack.” A somewhat fuller announcement appeared on 22 May in the London Times:

  The President and Fellows of Magdalen College have elected to an official Fellowship in the College as Tutor in English Language and Literature, for five years as from next June 15, Mr Clive Staples Lewis, M.A. (University College).

  Mr Lewis was educated first at Malvern College. He won a scholarship in classics at University College in 1915, and (after war service) a first class in Classical Moderations in 1920, the Chancellor’s Prize for an English essay in 1921, a first class in Literae Humaniores in 1922, and a first class in the Honour School of English Language and Literature in 1923.255

  Lewis would no longer be reliant on his father for support. His life suddenly seemed much more stable and settled. He thanked his father for his “generous support” over six long years, without complaint and always with encouragement. Lewis had arrived. He was finally an Oxford don.

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  1927–1930

  Fellowship, Family, and Friendship: The Early Years at Magdalen College

  Magdalen College, Oxford, was founded in 1458 by William Waynflete (ca. 1398–1486), Bishop of Winchester and Lord Chancellor of England. As the bishop of a wealthy diocese, and without any close family, Waynflete saw the endowment of Magdalen College as his personal project. Over a period of twenty years, Waynflete showered his new college with buildings and assets. When Waynflete drew up Magdalen’s first statutes in 1480, the college was wealthy enough to support forty fellows, thirty scholars, and a chapel choir. Few Oxford or Cambridge colleges could hope to be so well endowed. When Lewis took up his fellowship, Magdalen was still—along with St. John’s—widely regarded as the richest of the Oxford colleges.

  Fellowship: Magdalen College

  Lewis was formally admitted to his fellowship at Magdalen in a ceremony in August 1925. The entire fellowship of the college assembled to witness his admission, following the ancient tradition. Lewis was required to kneel before the president as a long Latin formula was read out. The president then lifted Lewis to his feet, addressing him with the words, “I wish you joy.” The dignity of the occasion was somewhat spoiled when Lewis clumsily tripped over his gown. Happily, he recovered from this disaster, and slowly worked his way around the room so that everyone present might personally wish him “joy,” while clearly wishing they were somewhere else.256 The reader might linger over that repeated word joy, given its significance for Lewis.

  Lewis actually took up his fellowship on 1 October. After spending more than two weeks with his father in Belfast, Lewis returned to Oxford to move into a set of rooms in Magdalen’s New Building (1733), a magnificent eighteenth-century Palladian structure which was originally intended to be the north side of a new quadrangle, but in the end remained standing alone in splendid isolation. Lewis was allocated room 3 on staircase III, a set of rooms consisting of a bedroom and two sitting rooms. The larger of the sitting rooms looked north over Magdalen Grove, home to the college’s herd of deer. The bedroom and smaller sitting room faced southwards, giving Lewis a magnificent view over a lawn to the main college’s buildings and famous tower. It is no exaggeration to say that Lewis had managed to secure one of the most beautiful views in Oxford.

  The character of Magdalen College at this time had been shaped by Sir Herbert Warren—affectionately known as “Sambo” to the fellows—who had been elected president of the college in 1885 at the age of thirty-two. Warren would not retire until 1928, and over the forty-three years of his presidency, he moulded the college in his own likeness. Perhaps one of the most striking features of the academic culture established by Warren was Magdalen’s “almost exaggerated collegiality and communal living.”257 Fellows were strongly encouraged to lunch and dine together. Bachelor fellows living in college—such as Lewis—would also breakfast together.258 Lewis had become part of a community of scholars.

  5.1 The president and fellows of Magdalen College, July 1928. This photograph was taken to mark the retirement of Sir Herbert Warren (centre front) as president of the college. Lewis is standing to the right of Warren in the back row.

  Where some colleges allowed their fellows to lunch or dine privately in their rooms, Warren insisted on fellows sharing meals, seeing this as a way of developing the corporate identity of the college and reinforcing its social hierarchy. At college dinner, fellows were required to process in gowns into Hall from the Senior Common Room in order of seniority. Their seats at High Table were likewise allocated according to seniority, and the familiar use of forenames was avoided. Fellows would refer to each other by surname or by office—“Mr. Vice-President,” “Senior Fellow,” or “Science Tutor.”259

  The complex social and intellectual machinery of Oxford University at this time was lubricated by vast quantities of alcohol. Magdalen was perhaps one of the most bibulous of Oxford’s colleges, with its resident fellows being particularly prone to overindulgence. During 1924 and 1925, the Senior Common Room paid off a debt by selling twenty-four thousand bottles of port, raising the sum of £4,000.260 Fellows who wagered against each other would calculate their winnings in terms of cases of claret or port, rather than cash. The Senior Common Room butler was once observed carrying a silver tray laden with brandy and cigars through the college cloisters at eleven o’clock one morning. On being asked what he was doing, the butler replied that he was bringing one of the fellows his breakfast. Lewis kept a barrel of beer in his rooms to entertain colleagues and students, but otherwise seems to have avoided the alcoholic excesses of the prewar years.

  President Warren’s trenchant views on collegiality shaped Lewis’s weekly routines. By January 1927, Lewis had perfected his regular working pattern. Outside university Full Term, he would reside at Hillsboro, and take a bus into college, where he remained during working hours, lunching in college. During university Full Term, Lewis slept in college, and bussed home to be with “the family” for the afternoons when he had no teaching or administrative responsibilities. He would return to Magdalen in the late afternoon, and dine with his colleagues.

  Lewis was paid a salary of £500 a year as an official tutorial fellow. It was a generous stipend, at the top of the range for fellows of the college. Had Lewis been elected a fellow by examination, he would have enjoyed only half that amount.261 However, it soon becam
e clear that college life at Magdalen would turn out to be rather more expensive than Lewis had anticipated. For a start, his rooms were devoid of any furniture or carpets. Lewis found two, and only two, items already present in his rooms: a washstand in his bedroom, and some linoleum in his smaller sitting room. He would have to furnish his rooms completely at his own expense. In the end, Lewis had to spend £90—a substantial sum in those days—buying carpets, tables, chairs, a bed, curtains, coal boxes, and fire irons. It was a massive and unexpected expense, even though Lewis economised wherever possible by buying secondhand goods.262

  Furthermore, Lewis regularly received demands from the college bursary for “Battels”—Oxford’s arcane term for college expenses incurred, such as meals and drink. Lewis confided to his diary that Mrs. Moore was far from happy when she discovered that he was receiving rather less income than he had led her to expect. After some rather awkward conversations with James Thompson, the college’s home bursar, Lewis began to realise that, after deductions, he would actually be taking home about £360 annually.263 And then there was still income tax to pay.

  5.2 The New Building, Magdalen College, around 1925.

  Lewis broke off his diary after a long entry for 5 September 1925 and did not resume until 27 April 1926. It is not difficult to work out why. Lewis was settling into a new way of life, with new colleagues to meet and a new institution whose workings he needed to understand. He had new lecture courses to prepare and tutorials to give. His tutorial work in philosophy was undemanding and uninteresting. Harry Weldon, Magdalen’s philosophy don, was inclined to dump the less interesting and less able pupils on Lewis, keeping the best students for himself. Yet the bulk of Lewis’s work consisted in giving lectures and tutorials in English literature, as well as teaching textual criticism to research students. There were few students reading English (and thus requiring tuition) at Magdalen at this time. But Lewis was still required to work up a new course of intercollegiate lectures in English literature, which he found very demanding.

  Lewis taught undergraduates at Magdalen (and other colleges by arrangement) in tutorials. This teaching method, characteristic of both of England’s “ancient universities” of Oxford and Cambridge, typically involved a single student reading an essay to a tutor, followed by discussion and criticism. Lewis quickly developed a reputation as a harsh and demanding tutor, although this mellowed over time. The 1930s are generally regarded as Lewis’s golden period of teaching at Oxford, by which time he had perfected his lecturing and tutorial techniques.264

  His early years, however, were marked chiefly by his impatience at the laziness and lack of perceptiveness on the part of his students, such as John Betjeman (1906–1984). Many of them seemed to regard their time at Oxford as an inebriated extension of their bawdy, lazy schooldays. It was no coincidence that the author P. G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) placed his immensely likable (yet equally lazy and slow-witted) character Bertie Wooster (author of “What the Well-Dressed Man Is Wearing” in Milady’s Boudoir) as an undergraduate at Magdalen just before the time of Lewis’s arrival.

  Family Rupture: The Death of Albert Lewis

  The death of Lewis’s mother in 1908 had marked a turning point in Lewis’s life. Lewis adored his mother, who was the anchor and foundation of his life. As we have seen, he came to despise and deceive his father. An X-ray of 26 July 1929 gave Albert Lewis’s doctors cause for concern, and led Lewis’s father to enter a comment in his pocket book: “results rather disquieting.”265 Early in September 1929, Albert Lewis was admitted to a nursing home at 7 Upper Crescent, Belfast. An exploratory operation revealed that he had cancer, although it was considered not to be sufficiently advanced to warrant immediate concern.

  5.3 The last known photograph of Albert Lewis, 1928.

  Lewis had travelled to Belfast to be with his father, arriving on 11 August. He found it to be a tedious business. He wrote to his close friend Owen Barfield, making his negative feelings towards his father disturbingly clear: “I am attending at the almost painless sickbed of one for whom I have little affection and whose society has for many years given me much discomfort and no pleasure.”266 Even though he had no affection for his father, he was finding his father’s deteriorated condition unbearable. What, he wondered, would it be like to attend the deathbed of someone you really loved?

  Lewis decided that his father’s condition was stable enough to permit him to return to Oxford on 21 September.267 He had no desire to stay with his father, and there seemed no point in doing so. He had work to do in Oxford to prepare for the beginning of the new academic year. This understandable decision turned out to be a misjudgement. Two days later, his father lost consciousness and then died from an apparent brain haemorrhage, possibly a complication arising from the operation, rather than from the cancer itself. Lewis, having been notified of his father’s turn for the worse, hurried back to Belfast from Oxford, but failed to arrive in time. In the end, Albert Lewis died on Wednesday, 25 September 1929, alone in the nursing home, unaccompanied by either of his sons.268

  The two leading city newspapers—the Belfast Telegraph and the Belfast Newsletter—published extensive obituaries of Albert Lewis, recalling his outstanding professional reputation and deep love for literature. It was easy to understand Warnie’s absence at his father’s death; after all, he was serving in the army, stationed far away in Shanghai. There was no way he would have been able to return from the Far East in time.

  Where most would see Lewis’s attitude towards his father as strained but dutiful, others believed that the esteemed solicitor had been let down by his younger son, who had compounded his lamentable decision to leave Ireland by not being with his father in his final hours.

  Albert Lewis had supported his younger son financially for six long years, and some in Belfast seem to have felt that he deserved better at Lewis’s hands. Canon John Barry (1915–2006), a former curate of St. Mark’s, Dundela—where Albert Lewis’s funeral took place on 27 September 1929—recalls a “sort of chill” later occasioned in certain Belfast circles by the mention of C. S. Lewis’s name, apparently on account of lingering resentment over the way he had treated his father.269 People have long memories in Belfast.

  Lewis unquestionably felt both pain and guilt at his father’s death for much of the remainder of his life. There are hints of this at numerous points in his letters, especially in the dramatic opening sentence of a letter of March 1954: “I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious.”270 Some agree with this criticism; others, however, feel that it is overstated.

  It is important to see this episode against the cultural background of the time in Belfast, particularly concern over sons who had left their parents to seek their fortunes in England. Yet Lewis did not choose to be educated in England; his father made that decision for him, thus laying the foundation for his younger son’s career at Oxford. A sympathetic reading of Lewis’s correspondence around this period indicates that his sense of duty towards his father took precedence over any absence of affection. Lewis spent six long weeks with his father in the summer of 1929, away from “the family,” and was unable to get work done to prepare for the new academic year at Oxford University. He needed to get home, and he justifiably believed his father was out of danger. Lewis returned to Ireland the moment he knew things had turned out badly.

  During his brief stay in Belfast around the time of his father’s funeral, Lewis came to certain decisions. Although his father’s will had appointed both sons as executors and sole beneficiaries, Warnie’s enforced absence in China meant that Lewis would have to act on their joint behalf in making certain legal decisions. Most important, Little Lea would have to be sold, though Lewis delayed on this. He sacked the gardener and housemaid, while retaining Mary Cullen—whom Lewis affectionately dubbed the “Witch of Endor”—as housekeeper until the house was sold. The decision to postpone selling the house was an uneconomic one, not least because the house would deteriorate over
the winter, reducing its potential sale value. Yet Lewis felt he had to wait for the return of his brother before making any final decisions about the disposal of the contents of the house.271

  Warnie finally returned on leave from Shanghai on 16 April 1930 and stayed with Lewis and Mrs. Moore in Oxford. Little Lea had not yet found a buyer. Lewis and Warnie travelled to Belfast to visit their father’s grave, and make their final joint visit to the memory-laden house. Both brothers found their visit to their former home depressing, partly on account of its state of decay, and partly on account of the irretrievable memories linked to it. Overwhelmed by the “intense stillness” and “utter lifelessness” of the rooms,272 the brothers solemnly buried their toys in the vegetable patch. It was a sad and forlorn farewell to their childhood, and the imaginary worlds they had once constructed and inhabited. In the end, Little Lea sold for £2,300—substantially less than they had anticipated—in January 1931. It was the end of an era.

  The Lingering Influence of Albert Lewis

  Lewis might have secured closure on his father in a legal and financial sense. Yet there is every reason to think that in Lewis’s own later years, he came to see his attitude towards his father in his declining years as reprehensible. Lewis secured emotional closure on the issue in his own characteristic way—by writing a book. Although Surprised by Joy can be read as a spiritual autobiography, rich in Lewis’s memories of his own past and the shaping of his inner world, it clearly played another role: it allowed Lewis to come to peace with his past behaviour.

  In a letter written to Dom Bede Griffiths in 1956, shortly after the publication of Surprised by Joy, Lewis reflected on the importance of being able to discern patterns in an individual’s life. “The gradual reading of one’s own life, seeing the pattern emerge, is a great illumination at our age.”273 It is difficult to read Lewis’s autobiographical reflections without bearing this point in mind. For Lewis, the narration of his own story was about the identification of a pattern of meaning. This enabled him to grasp the “big picture” and discern the “grand story” of all things, so that the snapshots and stories of his own life could assume a deeper meaning.