C. S. Lewis – A Life
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Was this move to Cambridge wise? Some certainly doubted it. John Wain, one of Lewis’s former pupils, suggested that it was like “leaving an overblown and neglected rose-garden for a horticultural research station on the plains of Siberia.”646 Wain’s meaning here was ideological, not meteorological. He was not thinking primarily of the icy east winds from the Urals that can make Cambridge so bitterly cold in winter, but of the clinically cool attitude towards literature that dominated the Cambridge English faculty at this time. Lewis was entering a lion’s den—a faculty which prized “critical theory” and treated texts as “objects” for analytical dissection, rather than for intellectual enjoyment and enlargement.
Others wondered whether the commuting during full term would wear Lewis down. Yet, as things turned out, Lewis proved able to cope with his new routine. He resided in his comfortable wood-panelled rooms at Magdalene College during the week, and returned to Oxford for weekends, taking the direct train from Cambridge to the Rewley Road station in Oxford. This was popularly known as the “Cantab Crawler” (because it stopped at every station, and took three hours to cover the 80 miles [128 kilometres]) or the “Brain Line” (a pun on main line, in that the route was frequented by academics of the two universities). Neither the line nor the Oxford station of that name now remain in use.
Some felt that Lewis tried too hard to fit in at Magdalene, perhaps reflecting his nervousness that he would not be accepted in his newly adopted college. Richard Ladborough, fellow and Pepys Librarian of the college from 1949–1972, felt that Lewis was too eager to win acceptance at Magdalene, cultivating a booming voice and “jolly farmer” bonhomie as a way of obscuring his personal shyness and social anxiety. Might Lewis’s shyness have been misunderstood as aggressiveness? Yet in the end, Lewis found acceptance more readily than he had dared to hope.
13.1 Magdalene College, Cambridge, seen from the River Cam in 1955.
By the end of his first complete calendar year in Cambridge, Lewis felt able to “pronounce the move to Cambridge a great success.” Magdalene College Cambridge was a “smaller, softer and more gracious place” than Magdalen College Oxford. In comparison with the increasingly industrialised city of Oxford, Cambridge was a “delightfully small” market town, allowing Lewis to get “a real country walk” whenever he wanted. “All my friends say I look younger.”647
Renaissance: The Inaugural Lecture at Cambridge
The success of Lewis’s inaugural lecture as Cambridge’s first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English may have contributed to his buoyant mood. The lecture was delivered at 5.00 p.m. in the largest humanities lecture room Cambridge had at its disposal on Lewis’s fifty-sixth birthday—Monday, 29 November 1954—while he was still resident in Oxford. Numerous reports of the lecture survive, emphasising the vast crowd that turned out to hear Lewis, and his remarkable competence as a lecturer.648 The BBC Third Programme gave serious consideration to broadcasting the lecture—a rare honour for such an academic event.649
Lewis’s theme was the periodization of literary history, an issue which he had explored during earlier lectures in Cambridge—a series of eight weekly lectures on Renaissance Literature delivered in Lent Term 1939, and the Clark Lectures, given at Trinity College in May 1944. Lewis reiterated a core theme of those lectures: “The Renaissance never happened.” It was a theme he had been developing for some years. As he wrote to the Milton expert Douglas Bush in 1941, “My line is to define the Renaissance as ‘an imaginary entity responsible for anything a modern writer happens to approve in the Fifteenth or Sixteenth Century.’”650
This challenging and bold statement needs careful nuancing. Lewis’s fundamental objection was to the widespread notion that a period called “the Renaissance” cast aside the drab, old ways of the Middle Ages, introducing a new golden age of literature, theology, and philosophy. This, he suggested, was a myth, constructed by none other than the advocates of the Renaissance itself. By failing to challenge this myth, Lewis argued, scholarship was simply perpetuating this ideologically driven reading of the history of English literature. In making this point, Lewis quoted from the Cambridge historian George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876–1962), who had hosted Lewis’s Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1944: “Unlike dates, ‘periods’ are not facts. They are retrospective conceptions that we form about past events, useful to focus discussion, but very often leading historical thought astray.”651
In at least some important respects, Lewis is entirely correct. Recent studies of the European Renaissance have shown that its “narrative of identity” was deliberately constructed to emphasise its agenda. Renaissance writers coined the term “the Middle Ages” to denote and to denigrate what they regarded as being a drab and degenerate period between the glories of classical culture and their rebirth and renewal during the Renaissance. Lewis rightly pointed out that history simply could not be allowed to be shaped by such polemical agendas, which sought to minimise the continuity between medieval and Renaissance culture. “The barrier between those two ages has been greatly exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda.”652 The literature of the Middle Ages deserved to be treated with sympathy and respect, not to be summarily dismissed in the manner encouraged by Renaissance humanism.
It is significant that Lewis’s lecture was primarily on the topic of “Renaissance.” Did Lewis use this lecture as a way of reinventing himself? Did the move to Cambridge entail, at least in his mind, a change in his identity—a personal renaissance, in which he was “born again,” as if emerging, transformed, from a cocoon? Was the Cambridge Lewis to be a new Lewis, drawing a line under some of the activities and issues that had been characteristic of his later Oxford years? It is, for example, significant that Lewis did not write anything substantial in the field of apologetics during his time at Cambridge. His popular writings of this period—such as Reflections on the Psalms and The Four Loves—are explorations of an assumed faith, not defences of a challenged faith.
Lewis now no longer saw himself primarily as an apologist, concerned to defend the Christian faith to its critics outside the church. His focus shifted to exploring and appreciating the depths of the Christian faith for the benefit of those who believed, or were close to believing. This new strategy is clearly set out in the opening pages of Reflections on the Psalms:
This is not what is called an “apologetic” work. I am nowhere trying to convince unbelievers that Christianity is true. I address those who already believe it, or those who are ready, while reading, to “suspend their disbelief.” A man can’t be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it.653
This final sentence needs to be read in the light of Lewis’s frequently repeated assertions that he found defending Christian ideas draining and exhausting (page 258). He seems to be arguing that he ought to be allowed to enjoy these ideas, rather than be forced into battle constantly on their behalf.
Yet Lewis’s concerns at Cambridge are best understood as representing a change in focus within Lewis’s overall approach, rather than a significant—let alone radical—change from his basic commitments. Lewis represents an approach to the Christian faith in which the mind, heart, reason, and imagination are brought into creative interplay, with different audiences in mind. During the 1940s and early 1950s, Lewis developed works of rational apologetics—such as Miracles and Mere Christianity—which offered a rational defence of the Christian faith to unbelievers; during the later 1950s, Lewis tended to focus on works—such as Surprised by Joy—exploring the imaginative and relational dimensions of faith, with a presumed Christian audience in mind. The shift in envisaged readerships may reflect Lewis’s changing perceptions of the needs of the moment; yet there is no loss of the comprehensive vision of the Christian faith that became so characteristic of Lewis, and was first seen in The Pilgrim’s Regress (1933).
Lewis’s inaugural lecture at Cambridge can certainly be read as the adept construction of an intellectual facade—not i
n the sense of something flimsy or deceitful, but rather in terms of shaping how one is seen. Just as Renaissance humanism developed its own narrative of identity, which Lewis skilfully deconstructed, so Lewis developed his own account of how he wished to be understood. Provocatively, he declared that he wished to be seen as an “intellectual dinosaur,” prepared to challenge the “chronological snobbery” of his day. Although some interpreted Lewis’s lecture otherwise—for example, as a manifesto for the reinvigoration of Christianity itself, or at least a Christian influence in literary studies—the ensuing controversy soon died down.
The perception that Lewis was a “dinosaur”—a massive beast whose values and working methods are ill-adapted to the modern world—has been reinforced by changing scholarly habits since the 1950s. Lewis’s personal library shows signs of intense engagement. Annotations and underlinings, sometimes in different inks, indicate successive rereadings of already familiar texts. The British historian Keith Thomas (1933– ) recently commented on the reading habits of the English Renaissance, noting the importance of annotation as a means of safeguarding the insights of extended periods of direct textual engagement:
It was common for Renaissance readers to mark key passages by underlining them or drawing lines and pointing fingers in the margin—the early modern equivalent of the yellow highlighter. According to the Jacobean educational writer John Brinsley, “the choycest books of most great learned men, and the notablest students” were marked through, “with little lines under or above” or “by some prickes, or whatsoever letter or mark may best help to call the knowledge of the thing to remembrance.”654
Thomas—who shares Lewis’s commitment to the extended, active reading of primary sources—also remarked that he had now “become something of a dinosaur.” Researchers no longer read books from cover to cover; they use search engines to find words or passages. But this approach has made researchers less sensitive to the deeper structures and inner logic of the texts they are discussing, and much less likely to make the “unexpected discoveries which come from serendipity.” As Thomas ruefully remarked, the sad truth was that what once took a lifetime to learn by slow and painful accumulation can now “be achieved by a moderately diligent student in the course of a morning.”
Nobody who has worked through Lewis’s heavily annotated personal library can doubt the intensity or quality of his engagement with the texts he studied. Lewis illustrates precisely the detailed textual engagement and conceptual mastery that Thomas applauds—yet believes to be in terminal decline through the rise of technology. So is literary scholarship a dying art? In speaking of himself as a “dinosaur,” was Lewis referring to his research methods, and not merely their outcomes? Lewis increasingly seems to witness to a lost age of scholarly methods, above all the mental inhabitation of primary sources, which does not appear to have survived his generation.
In the end, Lewis enjoyed a long and productive period at Cambridge, until ill health finally forced him to resign his chair with effect from October 1963. By my reckoning, Lewis wrote thirteen books and forty-four articles during his Cambridge years, not to mention numerous book reviews and several poems, and he edited three collections of essays. There were controversies, of course, perhaps most significantly the 1960 debate with F. R. Leavis and his supporters over the merits of literary criticism. Nevertheless, Lewis’s Cambridge period—while not being anything like Bunyan’s “Plain called Ease”—was certainly an oasis of creativity, resulting in some of his most significant works, including Till We Have Faces (1956), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), The Four Loves (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (published posthumously in 1964).
Yet Lewis’s Cambridge period was dominated by an event in his personal life, which had a significant impact on his writings during this time. Lewis found a new—but rather demanding—literary stimulus: Helen Joy Davidman.
A Literary Romance: Enter Joy Davidman
On Monday, 23 April 1956, without any fanfare of advance publicity or courtesy of prior announcement, C. S. Lewis married Helen Joy Davidman Gresham, an American divorcée sixteen years his junior, in a civil ceremony at Oxford’s Register Office at St. Giles. The ceremony was witnessed by Lewis’s friends Dr. Robert E. Havard and Austin M. Farrer. Tolkien was not present; in fact, it would be some time before he learned of this development. It was, in Lewis’s view, purely a marriage of convenience, designed to allow Mrs. Gresham and her two sons the legal right to remain in Oxford when their permission to reside in Great Britain expired on 31 May 1956.
After the brief ceremony, Lewis caught a train to Cambridge and resumed his normal pattern of weekly lectures. It was as if his marriage had made no difference to him. Lewis’s close circle of friends knew nothing of this development. He had gone behind their backs. Most of them believed that Lewis was reconciled to remaining a bachelor for the rest of his life.
So who was this “Mrs. Gresham,” whom Lewis married in such a furtive and secretive manner? And how did such a marriage come about? To understand this development, we need to appreciate the impact that Lewis had upon a specific audience—intelligent, literary women, who found Lewis to be both an effective apologist for the Christian faith and an enthusiastic and persuasive advocate of the use of literature in developing and communicating the themes of faith.
One such person was Ruth Pitter (1897–1992), a highly competent English poet who was awarded the Hawthornden Prize in 1937 for A Trophy of Arms, which she had published the previous year. During the Second World War, Pitter heard Lewis’s broadcast talks on the BBC, and found them a source of spiritual inspiration and intellectual stimulation. Pitter was in a state of despair at this time, which nearly led her to throw herself off Battersea Bridge in the dead of night. Reading Lewis, however, persuaded her that the world made sense. Her rediscovery of faith was, she later insisted, due to Lewis.655
Having been influenced so much by him, Pitter sought to meet Lewis, using mutual friends as a means of bringing this about.656 She asked Herbert Palmer (1880–1961) to help arrange a meeting. Lewis invited her to a lunch party at Magdalen College on 9 October 1946. It was the first of many such meetings, which led to a deep friendship and mutual respect on both sides. In 1953, Lewis even accorded her the rare honour of allowing her to address him as “Jack” in her letters. According to his friend and biographer George Sayer, Lewis once remarked that if he were the kind of man who was to get married, he would have wanted to wed the poet Ruth Pitter.657 But though some saw Pitter as Lewis’s obvious soul mate, nothing romantic resulted from this friendship.658 With Joy Davidman, however, things were different.
Helen Joy Davidman was born in 1915 in New York City to Jewish parents of eastern European roots, who had by then ceased to practise their religion. In September 1930, at the early age of fifteen, she began attending Hunter College in New York City, taking courses in English and French literature. While at Hunter, Davidman formed a friendship with the future novelist Bel Kaufman (1911– ), best known for her 1965 bestseller Up the Down Staircase. Kaufman recalls that Davidman tended to date “older men,” particularly those who were “seriously interested in literature.”659 Davidman herself showed considerable talent as a writer, and was awarded the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize while at Hunter for “Apostate,” based on a story about nineteenth-century Russia her mother had told her. After taking an MA in English literature from Columbia University in 1935, she tried to make a career of freelance writing.
Initially, things seemed to go well. She won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Series Award for her 1938 poetry collection, Letter to a Comrade. Then came an invitation to go to Hollywood. MGM, searching for new talent, recruited Davidman as a scriptwriter for a six-month trial period in 1939, paying her fifty dollars a week. During that time, Davidman worked on four scripts. MGM didn’t like any of them, and sent Davidman back to New York. There she devoted herself to earning a living, developing her writing, and working for the Communist Party.
By then Davidman’s life had taken an unexpected turn. Having “sucked in atheism with [her] canned milk,” Davidman encountered God suddenly and unexpectedly in the early spring of 1946. In a 1951 account of this dramatic event, Davidman suggested that God had, like a lion, been “stalking” her for a long time, awaiting an opportune moment to strike when she was unprepared. God “crept nearer so silently that I never knew he was there. Then, all at once, he sprang.”660
Having discovered God, Davidman began to explore the new territory of her faith. Her chief guide was a British author who had recently acquired fame in America—C. S. Lewis. The Great Divorce, Miracles, and The Screwtape Letters became her gateway to an intellectually enriched and robust faith. Yet while others merely sought Lewis’s advice, Davidman sought his soul.
In a series of newspaper reports in 1998, marking the centenary of Lewis’s birth, Davidman’s younger son, Douglas Gresham, declared that his mother had gone to England with one specific intention: “to seduce C. S. Lewis.”661 Although some questioned this statement at the time, there is a growing consensus that Douglas Gresham may have been quite accurate in his assessment of the situation.662