C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  Jack, for his part, felt an intense awkwardness about the fact that he had, in effect, cut loose from home and thrown in his lot with Mrs Moore and Maureen. Guilt made him hostile, and the more conscious he became that his father disapproved of the Mrs Moore set-up, the more venomous his hostility became. ‘Haven’t heard from my esteemed parent for some time; has he committed suicide yet?’ he asked Greeves in one letter of June 1919, and in July he wrote, ‘I hope you are avoiding my father as much as possible.’12

  As the summer term at University College came to an end, the question had naturally arisen of where, and with whom, Jack would spend the Long Vacation (from June until October). He wanted to be with Mrs Moore, but could not admit the extent of his involvement with her. Why could he not come to Ireland as usual? was the cunning request of both Albert and Warnie, neither of whom liked the sound of Mrs Moore at all. Jack parried, ‘Where could you pass your holiday better than in Oxford? The three of us could certainly spend our afternoons in a punt under the willows at least as comfortably as we did at Dunbar and the Mitre, honoured with so many famous ghosts, would be an improvement on the Railway Hotel.’13

  He felt torn. He both did, and did not, want to admit to himself that the childhood days at Little Lea had come to an end. In the event the vacation was a compromise, with Jack moving to and fro between his two homes, trying in each to pretend that the other did not exist. At the end of July, he and Warnie made a visit to Gastons to see the Kirkpatricks, and on their way back stayed in London to see a show – The Maid of the Mountains, with Bertram Wallis and José Collins. They then went back to Ireland together. In spite of various happy outings with their mother’s relations, the Ewarts and the Hamiltons (and a jaunt to Island Magee), the atmosphere at home was tense. A major quarrel developed between Jack and his father, and by the end of August Jack had returned to Oxford to reside in ‘lodgings’ – Uplands, Windmill Road, Headington – with Mrs Moore and Maureen. The quarrel rumbled on by letter throughout the late summer and early autumn. ‘I must ask you’, Jack implored, ‘to believe that it would have been easier for me to have left those things unsaid. They were as painful to me as they were to you.’14

  It would be fascinating to know from Jack’s tutors at University College how much any of these tensions were reflected either in his work or in his general demeanour during tutorials and at college meals. But no such record survives. All we know is that by the spring of 1920 he was ready to sit Honour Moderations, and to be placed very surely in the First Class. ‘I was very sorry to hear that I had allowed you first to learn the news about Mods from a stranger,’ he wrote home to his father. ‘I had put off writing until I was clear of Oxford.’15

  This letter, like nearly all the letters he wrote to his father at this period, reflects an agony of guilt about their quarrel and separation. The guilt was something which he was never, quite, able to expunge. He always regarded this spell of angry estrangement from Albert as ‘the blackest chapter of my life’.16

  ‘Clear of Oxford’ in that last letter meant that he was enjoying a walking holiday in Somerset ‘with a friend’. The friend, of course, was Mrs Moore. By the end of his next term, when he had started to study ancient history and philosophy for Greats, Lewis was completely wrapped up in a happy combination of academic work and domestic absorption in Mrs Moore’s doings and affairs. Ireland, which was in the grip of a civil war which threatened to destroy the entire Protestant population, seemed remote during the happy Oxford summer of 1920. ‘I cannot understand the Irish news at all,’ he wrote airily.17 This was the period when he came closest to an estrangement not only from the P’daytabird, but also from his beloved brother Warnie. Snatching a bit of leave from the Army, Warnie arrived in Oxford and was surprised to read, ‘I am afraid this is rather an unfortunate day for you to come up as I am taking a child’ (Maureen, of course) ‘to a matinee and shall not therefore be able to see you until rather late.’ This from his closest companion and friend. No feeling of apology accompanied this note, left at Warnie’s hotel, because by now Jack took it for granted that Mrs Moore and her family took precedence over everything. He added insult to injury by saying ‘another time if possible you should warn me for duty earlier.’ Seeing his brother had become a ‘duty’.18

  Warnie was nevertheless insistent about keeping open lines of communication with Jack, and in September 1920 he made Jack come on holiday with him to Ulster. Dreadful rows took place during this time between Jack and his father. When the boy had gone back to Oxford his father licked his wounds in the pages of his diary.

  I still think I was very badly – not to say insultingly and contemptuously treated by Jacks. It is questionable whether I did a wise thing in submitting as I did, but it would have made me miserable for the rest of my life to have had an open rupture and forbidden him the house. But such weakness with some natures is traded upon and made to justify further insult and disrespect.19

  There can be little doubt, once he lost control and tempers flared, that Jack Lewis could take a delight in tormenting his victim. One of his more sinister dreams, recorded at about this period, was of Mrs Moore and himself in a street off the Cowley Road, one of the poorer, slummier streets in East Oxford.

  We each had a man wrapped in sacking and helmeted with a biscuit tin, and we are throwing them up in the air to kill them with the fall. When that failed it became one man whom we succeeded in murdering (I am not sure how. I think by drumming his head on the pavement) and the rest of the dream consists of fearful anxiety lest we should be discovered.20

  Thanks to Warnie, some semblance of a relationship between Albert and Jack was maintained. Jack went home, for example, for Christmas 1920, and accompanied his brother to church; and a flow of dutiful letters were sent back to Little Lea from Oxford.

  Against this troubled emotional background, Lewis continued to read the ancient historians and the philosophers, and to see friends such as Barfield. The subject which now interested him most was philosophy; it appealed to that side of his nature which was born of the police-court solicitor and nourished at the feet of the Great Knock: the side which liked to argue, to dispute, to analyse, to indulge in intellectual cut and thrust. He began to nurse ambitions that he would become a professional philosopher and a fellow of one of the colleges. Meanwhile the side of his nature which read George MacDonald and W. B. Yeats, which saw visions and dreamed dreams, poured itself out in poetry, and he began to execute a large mythical work entitled Dymer.

  His academic prowess showed no signs of waning. In the spring of 1921, he wrote an essay on Optimism, which was awarded the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize and declaimed before the assembled University grandees, Doctors, Professors and Heads of House, at the annual Encaenia in June. While he was writing the essay, he also had two memorable encounters with one of his heroes, W. B. Yeats, who had taken up residence at 4 Broad Street, Oxford.

  The meetings with Yeats made a deep impression and he wrote them up for the benefit of both Arthur Greeves and his own father. He was struck by the rare, bogus-mystical ambience which the poet, then aged about sixty, had constructed around himself. Visitors were shown up a narrow staircase, lined with pictures by Blake – mainly illustrations to the Book of Job and Paradise Lost. There they found a room whose flame-coloured curtains were drawn shut, and whose only form of light derived from large, flickering six-foot candles of the kind normally seen on a church altar. Mrs Yeats reclined on a sofa, while the visitors sat around on hard upright chairs and listened to the oracular figure of Yeats himself, huge, fat, and with an affected voice which sounded almost as much French as it did Irish.21 ‘I understood the Dr. Johnson atmosphere for the first time – it was just like that, you know, we all sitting round, putting in judicious questions while the great man played with some old seals on his watch chain and talked.’22

  On Lewis’s first visit the talk, highly uncongenial to the young atheist visitor, was all of magic and apparitions. The Jesuit Master of Campion Hall, Father Mar
tindale, SJ, provided a skeletal presence in the flickering candlelight while Yeats prosed about the Hermetic books, lunar meditations, and the practice of magic which he said he had learnt from Bergson’s sister. It amazed Lewis the rationalist that intelligent people could be sitting about in a circle in Oxford and talking of the supernatural as if it were soberly true, and the incident was to have a deep effect on his imagination. Twenty years later, Lewis himself was to be the centre of just such a circle, discussing spirits and spiritualities with Charles Williams. Now Yeats was immediately transformed into the magician in Lewis’s own poem Dymer, and many years later Lewis drew on Yeats when he was describing the bulky mysterious figure of Merlin, the morally ambivalent wizard-ruffian of That Hideous Strength. ‘It is a pity’, Jack wrote to his father, ‘that the real romance of meeting a man who has written great poetry and who has known William Morris and Tagore and Symonds should be so overlaid with the sham romance of flame-coloured curtains and mumbo-jumbo.’23

  Silliness, sham and mumbo-jumbo have never been absent from the Oxford scene. Only a few yards down the street from Yeats’s house, the Reverend Montague Summers was writing his great book about vampires (of which he claimed to have first-hand knowledge). Lewis would not have been able to echo W. H. Auden’s view of Yeats: ‘you were silly like us’. Lewis’s generation, the men who came straight back from the trenches to pursue their studies at the University, were too relieved to be alive, and too emotionally shocked, to be able to indulge in the wild, liberating silliness either of their elders, like Yeats, or of the younger generation who were about to appear in Oxford – the heroically silly generation of Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club. Lewis’s undergraduate life, even without the presence of Mrs Moore, was prosaic, almost suburban. Those who do not have the sound of exploding shells still echoing in their dreams, and the memory of decaying young corpses forever present in their memories, might well be inclined to impatience with Lewis’s cult of the ordinary. It was at this period, in some dingy room in Headington, that he laid down his book and wrote a poem which, though indefensible from an aesthetic point of view, was unquestionably written from the heart:

  Thank God that there are solid folk

  Who water flowers and roll the lawn

  And sit and sew and talk and smoke

  And snore through all the summer dawn …

  Oh happy people, I have seen

  No verse yet written in your praise,

  And truth to tell, the time has been

  I would have scorned your easy ways.

  But now through weariness and strife

  I learn your worthiness indeed,

  The world is better for such life

  As stout, suburban people lead.

  The tragedy of Albert Lewis’s life was that his son had to learn this lesson not in his own suburban house at Strandtown, but in rented accommodation with his ‘adopted mother’. It has become customary for those who write about Lewis to speak of his fondness for Mrs Moore and the domestic routines in which she involved him as a tyranny which he endured with a martyr’s patience. Almost any domestic routine which involves more than one person can be viewed in this light; and it is unquestionable that Mrs Moore was a demanding companion whose desire for Lewis to be involved in the smallest detail of her life did not diminish with the years. But though she may have given him more than he bargained for, it would be unfair to her memory to deny that she was providing something which he very much needed and wanted.

  Mrs Moore was demanding, but she was also generous. Much of the shopping and fetching was only necessary because she wanted to entertain and to give people meals. She was naturally gregarious. Children and animals loved her. She was spontaneously affectionate – witness the occasion when she was asked to do jury service at the Oxford Crown Court and was upbraided by the court officials for being found sitting outside in the corridor with her arm around the defendant, comforting him in his nervous sorrow. She asked much, but she also gave much. She was entirely lacking in English ‘reserve’. If one wants to know what she meant to the young Lewis one should not read only the accounts of her written by Warnie when he was a jealous, crusty bachelor and she had grown into a querulous old woman. One should read the vision in The Great Divorce of a Great Lady surrounded by a procession of angels, children and animals.

  ‘Who are all these young men and women on each side?’

  ‘They are her sons and daughters.’

  ‘She must have had a very large family, sir.’

  ‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

  ‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind … Few men looked on her without becoming in a certain fashion her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true but truer to their own wives.’

  ‘And how … but hullo! What are all those animals? A cat, two cats – dozens of cats. And all those dogs … why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.’

  ‘They are her beasts.’

  ‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’

  ‘Every beast and bird that came near her had its place in her love. In her they became themselves.’24

  At about the time when Lewis was sitting in the candlelight at the feet of Yeats, William Kirkpatrick died, aged seventy-one. Lewis was stricken by the news and imagined the Great Knock confronting the Almighty with the Voltairean alexandrine, ‘Je soupçonne entre nous que vous n’existez pas,’ or telling Aristotle (this was a real Kirkian remark which he once made) that his logic had ‘the distinction of never having been the slightest use to any human being’.25 None of Lewis’s Oxford tutors was to make an impression upon him which was comparable with the impression made by Kirkpatrick. With Kirk he had felt the Romance of Ideas and the excitement of dialectic. And – an important feature of his religious development – while Kirkpatrick was alive, there could probably have been no question of his pupil – who had absorbed wholesale the ‘Gastons heresies’ – departing from the high old Victorian atheistic line. It was no doubt with a sad sense of how proud the Knock would have been that Jack Lewis collected his Chancellor’s English Essay Prize and, the following summer of 1922 (having spent the May before his exams nursing Maureen Moore’s influenza), a First Class degree in Greats.

  –EIGHT–

  HEAVY LEWIS

  1922–1925

  With a First in Mods, a First in Greats and the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, Lewis began to look eminently employable. In fact, like all but the most conceited young men, he despaired of getting started in the world, and regarded the possibility of finding permanent academic preferment as remote. Towards the end of his final term of Greats, his tutors put several offers of temporary employment in his way. Farquharson, at Univ, got him a job as private tutor to a family on Boar’s Hill, on the outskirts of Oxford, but he did not follow it up. Carritt, his philosophy tutor, pointed out a vacancy in the Classics Department at Reading University – £300 per annum for a lectureship, ‘apply E. R. Dodds, Head of their Classical Department’. ‘I wondered if this might not be Eric Dodds, the drunken Sinn Feiner and friend of Theobold Butler’s who had been at Univ. Going into town I met Carritt in the library and found that this was so.’ This job was actually offered to Lewis, but he withdrew when he discovered that it would necessitate living in Reading, half an hour from Oxford by train. Had he been a free agent, he probably would have taken the Reading job. But it was not desirable to move Maureen Moore, who was by now happily settled at Headington School for Girls, so conveniently near their present suburban Oxford lodgings. It would have been a ‘thousand pities’ to change Maureen’s school for a year. As well as continuing well with her music, Maureen had recently been elected house captain of cricket for day girls: ‘an
event’, Lewis noted, ‘which has hardly turned her head’.1 The schoolgirl’s needs dictated the student’s prospects, and because he was in love with Oxford, he was happy that this should be so. He looked over some of the examination papers required for getting into the civil service and decided ‘Greats’ was child’s play compared with them.2 He would not, in any event, have wanted to become a civil servant in London.

  These circumstances narrowed the field. Indeed, but for the very distinctive nature of Lewis’s position at this date, the story which follows might have been very different. Rich as his imagination was, it had not yet seen its truest modes of expression; brilliantly workable as his mind was, he had not yet discovered, though it was obvious to Kirkpatrick within a week’s acquaintance, the precise nature of what he was good at; remarkably mature as in some ways he was, in all the most crucial ways he remained unformed. What happened in the next two or three years was to be of lasting consequence. It therefore matters intensely that Lewis’s relationships with his father and with Mrs Moore made him see his circumstances in a manner which would have struck any outside observer as distorted.

  Once it had become clear that Lewis was clever enough to hope for an Oxford fellowship, his father said that he would continue to provide him with adequate financial support until the right post materialized. Lewis tried to persuade himself that this was not the case, but it was re-emphasized for him not only by his father’s written assurances, but also by Lily Ewart, a relation who came to live near Oxford at about this time and who was delegated by Albert Lewis to make the position clear. Jack, who was by now in the grip of an uncontrollable love-hatred of his father, with a very marked bias, whenever they actually met, towards hatred, longed to be rid of parental support. So long as he depended on Albert’s money, the tension was acute. Moreover that income was not sufficient to meet the needs of three people.