Yet the next sentence in this letter to Griffiths discloses a deeper concern that Lewis clearly saw as significant: “getting freed from the past as past by apprehending it as structure.” The close reader of Surprised by Joy will note the omission or marginalization of three extended issues that clearly caused Lewis emotional difficulty for much of his later life.
First, and perhaps most famously, he makes it clear that he is honour bound not to mention Mrs. Moore, despite the enormous role she played in his personal history. “Even were I free to tell the story,” he writes, “I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of the book.”274
The second notable feature is the relative absence of reference to the suffering and devastation of the Great War, which created intellectual havoc in the minds and souls of so many. We have drawn attention to this point earlier in this narrative, and it is important to understanding Lewis’s development, both as a scholar and as a Christian apologist. Where some have argued that Lewis’s rediscovery of religious faith can be seen within a broadly psychoanalytic narrative thread that gives unity to Lewis’s development, the evidence does not warrant such a conclusion. The real issue lies in the destruction of the fixed certainties, values, and aspirations of an earlier generation by the haunting memories of the horrors of the mass carnage of modern warfare—a theme that pervades much English literature of the 1920s.
The third understatement concerns the death of Albert Lewis in 1929. This, Lewis declares, “does not really come into the story” he wants to tell.275 Perhaps Lewis deemed it irrelevant. Perhaps it was also too painful to discuss. How much are we to read into a section of Lewis’s later essay “On Forgiveness” (1941), in which he emphasises the need to accept that we have been forgiven, even though we believe ourselves to be unforgivable? In inviting his audience to reflect on the need to acknowledge human failings, Lewis gives some examples of persistent behaviours that need constant forgiveness. One stands out to all who know Lewis’s personal history: the “deceitful son.” “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”276
One of the major themes of Till We Have Faces (1956)—arguably the most profound piece of fiction written by Lewis—is the difficulty of coming to know ourselves as we really are, and the deep pain that such knowledge ultimately involves. Perhaps we ought to read Surprised by Joy with this point in mind. The suppression of certain themes in Lewis’s account of his own development is not a mark of dishonesty, but of the pain their memory engendered.
There is one particular point that puzzles the reader of Lewis’s correspondence around the time of his father’s death. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis tells us he began to actively believe in God at some point during Oxford’s “Trinity Term of 1929”277—at least three months, and possibly five, before his father’s death. Yet at no point in his correspondence around the time of his father’s death—or, indeed, for the six months following—does Lewis mention this belief, or speak of deriving any consolation from it.
Lewis did not regard his father with great affection, and seems to have found his passing a relief rather than a trauma. Yet this absence of reference to God around this time is as conspicuous as it is curious. It does not fit well into Lewis’s own chronology of his conversion. Might it be that the death of Albert Lewis actually caused Lewis to explore the question of God, instead of being something that Lewis interpreted in the light of such a belief? Might his father’s death have prompted Lewis to ask deeper—and as yet unanswered—questions about life, and search for more satisfying answers? We shall return to this question in the following chapter, where we shall raise further concerns about the traditional understanding of Lewis’s journey from atheism to Christianity.
Family Reconnection: Warnie Moves to Oxford
In 1930, Lewis’s domestic arrangements changed significantly. As we have seen, following the death of their father in September 1929, the two Lewis brothers were left as sole heirs to Little Lea. Lewis had corresponded with his brother, Warnie, in Shanghai in January 1930 about the difficult and painful matter of placing their childhood home on the market. Warnie wanted to visit the house for one last time before it was sold; Lewis wanted to get it sold as soon as possible, while realising that an early sale would prevent his brother from making such a sentimental visit.278
It is clear that another possibility was beginning to emerge in Lewis’s mind: the re-creation of the brothers’ shared childhood “Little End Room” of “Little Lea” in Oxford. What if Warnie were to move in with Lewis when he left the army—perhaps by using one of Lewis’s set of rooms at Magdalen? Or perhaps by joining with Mrs. Moore and getting a larger house than Hillsboro? Mrs. Moore, it must be emphasised, appears to have been actively supportive of this latter, more ambitious possibility. It was a natural outcome of her intrinsically hospitable nature. Warnie would not be their guest, but an integral part of their household—their family.
In raising this possibility with his brother, Lewis emphasised that this would have drawbacks. Would he be able to abide by their indifferent “cuisine”? With Maureen’s frequent “sulks”? With “Minto’s mare’s nests”? Yet there was no concealing that Lewis wanted Warnie to be part of his family life. “I have definitely chosen and don’t regret the choice. What I hope—very much hope—is that you, after consideration, may make the same choice, and not regret it.”279
In May 1930, Warnie made two decisions. First, he would edit the papers of the Lewis family, as a way of paying homage to his parents; second, he would move into Hillsboro with his brother and his brother’s family as soon as it was possible. Another possibility was developing even as Warnie made his decision—the purchase of a new and larger house. Up to this point, Lewis and Mrs. Moore had rented properties together. But Lewis’s fellowship had been renewed after its initial five years. He was now in a financially stable situation, with the assurance of a regular income for the rest of his working life. He and Warnie could expect to receive a reasonable sum when Little Lea finally sold. Warnie had savings. And Mrs. Moore had inherited a trust fund as a result of the death of her brother, Dr. John Askins. If they pooled their resources, they could purchase a property big enough for them all.
5.4 Lewis, Mrs. Moore, and Warnie at The Kilns during the summer of 1930.
On 6 July 1930, Lewis, Warnie, and “the family” saw “The Kilns” for the first time. It was a somewhat unimpressive, low-lying building in Headington Quarry, close to the foot of Shotover Hill, where Lewis enjoyed walking. Set in eight acres of grounds, the property would need expansion to accommodate four people. Yet all three partners in the enterprise pronounced themselves satisfied with the property, even with all the work that needed to be done. The asking price was £3,500, which was negotiated down to £3,300. Warnie paid the cash deposit of £300, and contributed £500 towards the mortgage. Mrs. Moore’s trustees advanced her £1,500, and Lewis himself added £1,000.280 Two additional rooms were added on shortly afterwards, ready for Warnie’s final return from military service.
The property was held in Mrs. Moore’s name, with each brother having permanent right of occupation during his lifetime. The Kilns was not, strictly speaking, Lewis’s home. He lived there, but did not own it. He had all that he needed—a “Right of Life” tenancy which allowed him and Warnie permanent right of abode until their deaths. On Mrs. Moore’s death in January 1951, title to the property passed to her daughter, Maureen, with both Lewis brothers continuing to have right of abode until their deaths.281 (In the end, free-and-clear title to the house and estates passed to Maureen on the death of Warnie in 1973.)
The Kilns would play a significant role in consolidating Lewis’s life, not least because it provided a stable home for his brother. Warnie embarked from Shanghai on 22 October 1932 on the SS Automedon. He arrived in the port city of Liverpool on 15 December, and then travelled south to Oxford. “It all seems too good to be true!” Lewis wrote to him. “I can hardly believe that when you take your shoes off
a week or so hence, please God, you will be able to say ‘This will do for me—for life.’”282 Warnie finally retired from the army on 20 December, although he remained on the reserve list.283 This renewed relationship with his brother, for better or worse (and it was mostly better), would be of critical importance for the remainder of Lewis’s life.284
Yet we must mention another relationship to emerge around this time, which would also be of importance to Lewis: his deepening friendship with John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973).
Friendship: J. R. R. Tolkien
Lewis’s teaching responsibilities extended beyond Magdalen. He was a member of Oxford University’s Faculty of English Language and Literature, and delivered intercollegiate lectures on aspects of English literature—such as “Some Eighteenth-Century Precursors of the Romantic Movement.” He also attended meetings of the faculty, which largely consisted of discussing teaching and administrative arrangements. These meetings were held at 4.00 p.m., following afternoon tea at Merton College, the home base of Oxford’s two Merton Professors of English, and were often referred to as the “English Tea.”285
5.5 J. R. R. Tolkien, photographed in his rooms at Merton College in the 1970s. © Billett Potter, Oxford.
It was at an English Tea on 11 May 1926 that Lewis first met J. R. R. Tolkien—a “smooth, pale, fluent little chap,”286 who had joined Oxford’s English faculty as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon the previous year. Lewis and Tolkien would quickly find themselves embattled over the shape of the Oxford English curriculum. Tolkien argued for a curriculum closely focussed on ancient and medieval English texts, requiring the mastery of Old and Middle English; Lewis believed English was best taught by focussing on English literature after Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343–1400).
Tolkien was prepared to defend his corner, and worked hard to promote the study of forgotten languages. To advance his agenda, he founded a study group he named the Kolbítar, aimed at fostering an appreciation of Old Norse and its associated literature. Lewis became a member.287 The curious term Kolbítar was adopted from Icelandic; it literally means “coal-biters,” and was a derisive term for Norsemen who refused to join in the hunt or fight battles, preferring instead to stay indoors and enjoy the protective warmth of the fire. As Lewis put it, the term (which he insisted is to be pronounced “Coal-béet-are”)288 refers to “old cronies who sit round the fire so close that they look as if they were biting the coals.” Lewis found this “little Icelandic club” a massive stimulus to his imagination, throwing him back into “a wild dream of northern skies and Valkyrie music.”289
The relationship between Lewis and Tolkien is one of the most important of his personal and professional life. They had much in common, in terms of both literary interests and shared experiences of the battlefields of the Great War. Yet Lewis’s correspondence and diary make little save incidental reference to Tolkien until late in 1929. Then evidence of a deepening relationship begins to emerge. “One week I was up till 2.30 on Monday (talking to the Anglo Saxon Professor Tolkien),” Lewis wrote to Arthur Greeves, “(who came back with me to College from a society and sat discoursing of the gods & giants & Asgard for three hours).”290
Something that Lewis said that evening must have persuaded Tolkien to take the younger man into his confidence. Tolkien asked Lewis to read a long narrative poem he had been composing since his arrival in Oxford, titled The Lay of Leithian.291 Tolkien was a senior Oxford academic with a public reputation in the field of philology, but with a personal and intensely private passion for mythology. Tolkien had drawn the curtains aside from his private inner self and invited Lewis into his sanctum. It was a personal and professional risk for the older man.
Lewis could not have known it, but at this point Tolkien needed a “critical friend,” a mentor who would encourage and criticise, affirm and improve, his writing—above all, someone who would force him to bring it to completion. He had had such “critical friends” in the past, in the form of two of his old school friends—Geoffrey Bache Smith (1894–1916) and Christopher Luke Wiseman (1893–1987).292 However, Smith had joined the Lancashire Fusiliers, and died of wounds inflicted in the Battle of the Somme; and Wiseman had drifted from Tolkien after his appointment in 1926 as headmaster of the Queen’s College, Taunton, in England’s West Country. Tolkien was a niggling perfectionist, and he knew it. Indeed, his late story “Leaf by Niggle”—which deals with a painter who can never finish his painting of a tree because of his constant desire to expand and improve it—can be seen as a self-parodying critique of Tolkien’s own difficulties in writing. Someone had to help him conquer his perfectionism. And what Tolkien needed he found in Lewis.
We may safely assume that Tolkien breathed a deep sigh of relief when Lewis responded enthusiastically to the poem. “I can quite honestly say,” he wrote to Tolkien, “that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight.”293 While we must pause the telling of this particular story as we move on to focus on other matters, it is no exaggeration to say that Lewis would become the chief midwife to one of the great works of twentieth-century literature—Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
Yet in a sense, Tolkien would also be a midwife for Lewis. It is arguable that Tolkien removed the final obstacle that stood in Lewis’s path to his rediscovery of the Christian faith—a complex and important story, which demands a chapter in its own right.
CHAPTER 6
* * *
1930–1932
The Most Reluctant Convert: The Making of a Mere Christian
Lewis is today remembered as a Christian writer. Yet the tone of his writings of the early 1920s is unquestionably atheistic, severely critical if not totally dismissive of religion in general and Christianity in particular. So how and why did he change his mind? In this chapter, we shall consider the slow conversion of Lewis from his early atheism, initially to a firm intellectual belief in God by the summer of 1930, and finally to an explicit and informed commitment to Christianity by the summer of 1932. It is a complex story, worth telling in detail both on account of its intrinsic interest and as a means of allowing us to understand Lewis’s rise to fame as a Christian voice in the quite different worlds of literary scholarship and popular culture.
The English Literary Religious Renaissance of the 1920s
In 1930, the celebrity author Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966)—whose novel Vile Bodies had been hailed earlier that year as “the ultramodern novel”—dropped a bombshell in literary circles. He announced that he had become a Catholic. This development was so unexpected and significant that it immediately made the front pages of one of Britain’s leading newspapers, the Daily Express. How, its editor wondered, could an author best known for his “almost passionate adherence to the ultramodern” have embraced the Catholic faith? For the next week, the paper’s columns were filled with comment and reflection on this unexpected and baffling development.
Yet the cultural attention given to Waugh’s conversion was only partly due to his celebrity status as a fashionable young author of bestselling satirical novels. Waugh was the latest in a long line of literary figures to embrace Catholicism—such as G. K. Chesterton (1874–1936), who converted in 1922, and Graham Greene (1904–1991), who converted in 1926.294 Some began to wonder if a Christian literary renaissance was under way.
Not all of the literary figures to convert to Christianity in this brief yet intense period of Christian revival adopted Catholicism. In 1927, T. S. Eliot (1888–1965)—then best known for his poem “The Waste Land” (1922), still widely acknowledged as one of the finest and most-discussed poems of the twentieth century—converted to Anglicanism. Although Eliot’s conversion did not make quite the same newspaper headlines as Waugh’s, Eliot’s huge reputation as a poet and literary critic ensured that his conversion was widely discussed and debated. Eliot found in Christianity a principle of order and stability located outside the human self, which allowed him a secure vantage point from which to engage with the world.
Some four
or five years later, Lewis became a Christian. Like Eliot, he chose to become a member of the Church of England. Yet nobody had ever heard of Lewis, and nobody paid any attention to this development—if they noticed it at all. Lewis, it must be appreciated, was almost totally unknown in 1931. He had published two cycles of poems under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton. Neither had been a critical or commercial success. Lewis’s rise to popular fame would not begin until 1940, with the publication of The Problem of Pain, which can now be seen to have set in motion a series of developments leading to his celebrity status as a wartime apologist. Where Evelyn Waugh drew attention to his religious faith on account of his fame as a novelist, Lewis’s faith would be the basis for the works that would eventually secure him popular acclaim.
Nevertheless, Lewis fits into a broader pattern at this time—the conversion of literary scholars and writers through and because of their literary interests. Lewis’s love of literature is not a backdrop to his conversion; it is integral to his discovery of the rational and imaginative appeal of Christianity. Lewis hints at this throughout Surprised by Joy. “A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere.”295 Lewis’s reading of the classics of English literature forced him to encounter and evaluate the ideas and attitudes that they embodied and expressed. And to his chagrin, Lewis began to realise that those who were grounded on a Christian outlook seemed to offer the most resilient and persuasive “treaty with reality.”
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 14
