C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  Yet those are mistaken who imagine (as, for example, Warnie did) that Mrs Moore was nothing but a distraction from the serious business of work. For one thing, although she was a distraction, she did try not to be. She honestly believed that she was making life easier for Jack, by providing him with a background of home, where not only were meals provided and clothes mended, but his time was also jealously guarded. She made a point of ensuring that others did not disturb him when he was at his books, even though it was not always a rule that she was able to keep herself.

  I don’t think I ever saw J[ack] work more than half an hour without the cry of ‘Barboys!’ – ‘Coming, dear!’, down would go the pen, and he would be away perhaps five minutes, perhaps half an hour; possibly to do nothing more important than stand by the kitchen range as scullery maid. Then another spell of work, then the same all over again. And these were the conditions under which Screwtape and indeed all his books were produced.2

  How, it may be asked, could any serious work be done in those circumstances? The answer is that in the years when Minto was in her full vigour, Lewis’s flow of words was limited. A glance at the shelf containing his long list of books shows us immediately that the bulk of his work was completed when Minto was in her dotage or after she died. He was a fluent and rapid prose writer. But his first major prose work – The Allegory of Love – took about eight years to complete. This was the price he paid for having thrown in his lot with a person who with all her virtues – generosity, warmth of character, genuine and passionate admiration, as well as love, for Lewis himself – did not have the concept of a working day. She belonged to that great majority of intelligent human beings who think of a book as something with which to beguile the hours of solitude of an evening. After years of living with Lewis she still knew but did not know that ‘a man’ could regard reading as the main business of the day and everything else as an interruption.

  On the other hand, if Lewis had been allowed to live in this way, though we might have had a few more mighty works of literary history from his pen, it is doubtful whether he would have written the works for which he is more popular. He is the great chronicler of the minor domestic irritation, of the annoying little trait bulking to (literally) hellish proportions. Domestic life with his father had been the training-school for this distinctively Lewisian vision. Minto not only provided him with plenty of Screwtape-style domestic situations. She also had a rich enjoyment of the comedy of human character, which was one of the things she shared with Lewis. For example, at the next table at the Exmoor Forest Hotel, he had overheard two people talking to each other, a ‘very well bred looking old man with a dry peevish voice whom I took to be mentally deranged and a woman who was either his daughter or his nurse’. Lewis took the trouble to transcribe what he remembered of their conversation:

  HE: Look at this ham. It’s all cut in chunks.

  SHE: Oh, do be quiet.

  HE: Anyone would think they were cutting it for coal-heavers (pause) or stonebreakers. It’s … it’s … wasteful you know, so wasteful.

  SHE: Well, you needn’t worry about that, need you.

  HE (savagely): Look at that. It’s abominable.

  SHE: Oh do be quiet. Get on with your lunch. I want to go out.

  HE: What’s it like out?

  SHE: It’s lovely.

  HE: Oh yes, I know it’s lovely. What I want to know is, is it cold or hot?

  SHE: It was cold when I first went out, but—

  HE (Interrupting): There you are, cold. I knew it was cold.

  SHE: I was going to say, if you’d let me, that it was very hot before I got back.

  HE (after a pause): Look at that. It’s really disgraceful to cut ham like that. It was a nice ham too. Well smoked, well cured and good fibre. And they go and spoil it all by cutting it in chunks. Chunks. Just look at that (stabbing a piece and holding it up in mid-air).

  SHE: Oh, do get on.

  HE: (Something inaudible)

  SHE: Well they’ve as much right here as we have. Why can’t you get on and eat your lunch?

  HE: I’m not going to be hustled over my lunch. Hustled. I won’t let you hustle me in this way. (A pause.) Why don’t you ask Mrs Ellworthy to let you make some of that nice porridge of yours.

  SHE: How could I in a hotel? (They had a long argument over this.)

  Then HE (almost pathetically): Why don’t you eat some of this salad? It’s beautifully flavoured (here his voice broke and he added almost in a whisper) – with CUCUMBER. If it wasn’t for the ham …

  And so they went on.3

  The impulse which made Lewis transcribe the dialogue at such length was something which could have been directed into comic fiction. It was the side of Lewis which reflected his father’s love of ‘wheezes’. Albert’s love of recording the essential transitoriness of irritation, mere human annoyingness, gives an almost stream-of-consciousness effect in the Lewis Papers. ‘Sunday, August 10, 1913: I wish this awful man would not come into our house’ is a fairly typical entry, transcribed from Albert’s pocket diary. Obviously in the presence of some prize bore, Albert had scribbled this down and shoved the book across the table to Warnie or Jack. Everyone in the world has had such thoughts. The distinctive Lewisian thing was to have written them down. In Albert’s ‘wheezes’, human beings are often behaving foolishly, but they are usually observed with some warmth. In Jack’s transcriptions of such experiences, the vision of humanity is bleaker. Already, before he has found a theological universe in which to create them, they have the feeling of lost souls, fodder for hell. I suspect that Mrs Moore’s sense of humour contributed much to the genuine streak of misanthropy in Lewis’s nature.

  In spite of this, his animus against his father was already diminishing. At the end of the vacation – in the last two weeks of September – he returned to Ulster, and Albert gratefully recorded, ‘Jacks returned. A fortnight and a few days with me. Very pleasant. Not a cloud. Went to the Boat with him. The first time I did not pay his passage money. I offered, but he did not want it.’4

  Jack Lewis was about to embark on his professional career as a college tutor at Magdalen; and since not everyone is familiar with the way Oxford functions, it might be worth explaining exactly what his work was going to entail. He did not need Albert to pay his fare on the Irish packet for, at last, he was an independent man, earning his own living. As a Fellow of Magdalen he earned £500 a year, considerably more than his father’s allowance of £210. Lewis was about to embark on a three-stranded career. He would be a university lecturer, responsible for lecturing perhaps once a week; a Fellow of Magdalen, involved in the administration of the College; and, perhaps most importantly, a college tutor. He was responsible for all those men at Magdalen who were reading English. He had to prepare them for the study of Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Middle English (that is, the language and literature of England from about 1200 until 1450, including Chaucer) and all the remaining periods of English literature up to the Victorian period. He was also responsible for instructing his pupils in the History of the English Language and in philology (the growth, history and structure of words). Some of this teaching could be done in classes – the routine language work, for example. But the bulk of it was done by way of the tutorial, a weekly session in which the pupil read aloud an essay of some three thousand words to his tutor and they then discussed it. This is the distinctive method of instruction at Oxford, and it is extremely prodigal of time. If, say, Lewis had seven pupils in one week all of whom had written an essay on Wordsworth, he would, instead of having one hour in which they all discussed Wordsworth together, have seven hours in which they all discussed Wordsworth separately.

  This method of teaching, though daunting at first for the pupil, is a formative experience, the aspect of the course to which most Oxford graduates look back with most gratitude. It is not an hour in which a pupil sits learning what the tutor has to teach. It is, or should be, an hour in which the pupil gradually comes to learn to defend himself or he
rself in argument, to have confidence in his or her own prose style, to grow up intellectually. But it has a strange effect on the tutor. For the pupils (to keep to the same example), it is one gloriously stimulating hour in which they have the chance to pour out all that they have felt and discovered about The Prelude. Very few people, at nineteen or twenty, have the humility or cynicism to realize that their thoughts on any particular book will coincide with eerie exactitude to everyone else’s. For the tutor it is the seventh conversation about The Prelude he or she has had that week. After only a very few years of teaching it becomes the twenty-first or the forty-ninth. It is small wonder that many dons (as teachers at Oxford are called; a shortening of Latin dominus) develop a kind of crust, a persona, a ‘character’ to help them through these increasingly one-sided experiences. ‘O brave new world that has such people in it,’ says Miranda; to which donnish Prospero replies, “Tis new to thee.’ The good Oxford tutor never forgets that ‘‘tis new to thee.’ But in order not to forget it, an element of artifice, of manner, is essential from the start.

  The younger the tutor, the more this manner will be felt necessary as a defence. This is not to say that a don must affect mannerisms or artificial eccentricities as a way of keeping his distance from the pupil – though many have done this. It is more an inevitable consequence of two people (particularly people of a similar age) finding themselves sitting together week after week in a setting which, socially speaking, is hard to define. In Lewis’s day, some formality was added to the proceedings by the undergraduate’s wearing a gown. Nevertheless, as they both sat in upholstered armchairs or a sofa in front of a fire, there was something domestic about it. ‘I’m not your schoolmaster,’ Lewis once crossly remarked to a pupil. Nor quite, though, is the pupil considered the tutor’s equal. Again, in Lewis’s day the relationship would have begun with the pupil calling his tutor ‘Sir’ and the tutor calling his pupil by his surname. Later, when they came to know each other better, the pupil might graduate to calling him ‘Lewis’, but this would be in the case of intimates. There is something curiously intimate about the tutorial – about meeting regularly à deux to have conversations of a depth and intellectual intensity which will probably never be repeated in the pupil’s life. Yet where the two do not like one another or the chemistry is wrong, the relationship will remain distant for the entire three years.

  From the beginning, Lewis was a conscientious tutor who tried to keep the balance right between amiability or conviviality (not always possible between incompatible types) and his duty to the pupils to give them sufficient preparation for their examinations. Since he was also responsible for teaching a weekly class of seven young women at Lady Margaret Hall (a women’s college in North Oxford) and for teaching philosophy to the undergraduates of Magdalen, his first few years at the College were strenuous.

  English, as a subject, had evolved cautiously, and at Oxford, for many years, it was on the defensive. First, it was on the defensive against the Germans. It was they, shamingly, who had led the great discovery of old Germanic literature, which included the Old English texts Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Seafarer and the great rhythmical prose-sermons of Aelfric and Wulfstan. English scholars, all classicists or ex-classicists, hurried to catch up and prove themselves the equals of the Germans in philological and textual skill.

  Then again, English at Oxford was on the defensive against the other faculties. Was English a ‘proper subject’ such as Law or Greek? Since any well-educated person had read The Rape of the Lock or Paradise Lost, how could English justify itself as an academic discipline? The answer was that it would make the study of literature highly historical and linguistic. In order to do well at English at Oxford, you would have to show more than a purely aesthetic aptitude. You would need to have a sound grasp of English history before you began; and you would need, at every point, to relate your study of the literature of any given period to the state and development of the language. In the earliest stages, this required a full working knowledge of the processes of Germanic philology and the history of sound-change, a branch of study which is extremely difficult to master. It calls on the speculative ability of a scientist (for the so-called laws of sound-change such as Grimm’s Law and Verner’s Law are, like scientific laws, working hypotheses about the development of sound); it also requires a workable memory and a simple ability to reason, to see logical consequences, an ability not always found among students of literature.

  Lewis worked extremely hard at preparing this part of the course for his pupils. Needless to say, it was the part which most of them hated; they were longing to get it finished so that they could write their essays on Hamlet or Keats. Without a knowledge of what was happening to Germanic diphthongs and vowels in the Dark Ages, however, even a clever pupil at Oxford in those days would have done badly.

  Lewis organized ‘Beer and Beowulf’ evenings for his pupils, during which he taught them to chant mnemonics to master the processes of sound-change:

  Thus to they soon were fetchin’

  Cf. such forms as ÞC and ÞECCEAN.

  There is a kind of innocence about this which makes the modern reader, coming upon it all sixty years after the event, squirm with embarrassment. The bluffness of Lewis, which before he became a don was only part of his nature (‘Heavy Lewis’), was fast hardening into a persona. The more arty and airy-fairy his pupils, the bluffer and beerier and louder he became. Magdalen, which had been Oscar Wilde’s college, always attracted a fair number of rarefied and aesthetic young men, and it was on to the path of this tradition that one of Lewis’s first pupils, John Betjeman, happily placed his bedroom-slippered toe.

  Betjeman appeared in a pair of eccentric bedroom slippers and said he hoped I didn’t mind them as he had a blister. He seemed so pleased with himself that I couldn’t help saying that I should mind them very much myself but that I had no objection to his wearing them – a view which I believed surprised him.5

  Betjeman liked teasing Lewis. He opted to be taught medieval Welsh as a special subject. He was perfectly entitled to do this by the statutes of the English Faculty; but there being, at that date, no one in Oxford who could teach it, Lewis had to organize a tutor from Aberystwyth to be brought to Oxford once a week by train. Sometimes Betjeman surprised Lewis by producing ‘a very creditable essay’. But for the most part he was, in Lewis’s eyes, an ‘idle prig’ who wasted his time cultivating well-born families and pretty boys and visiting exotic churches. On one occasion when he had failed to produce an essay for the third week running, Betjeman wandered sheepishly into Lewis’s room and threw himself on his knees by the hearth.

  ‘What is the matter, Betjeman?’ asked Lewis.

  ‘I’m hopeless. I’ve failed to produce an essay yet again. I shall be a failure, I shall have to take Holy Orders, but you see, I’m in such an agony of doubt, I can’t decide.’

  ‘What can’t you decide, Betjeman?’

  ‘Whether to be a very High Church clergyman with a short lacy surplice, or a very Low Church clergyman with long grey moustaches.’6

  Lewis treasured this conversation in after years, but at the time he found it disconcerting and annoying. He bullied Betjeman. ‘You’ve got no style, Betjeman,’ he used to taunt the younger man. ‘Why can’t you go away and get some style?’7 Betjeman asked Lewis to a number of his parties, and Lewis found their High Church pansyism fairly difficult to stomach. He saw Betjeman’s qualities. It may even have been – for he was quick to spot poetic talent – that he could see where Betjeman’s true genius lay. If so, it would only have increased his feeling of vulnerability and awkwardness for, until he had come to recognize that he was not going to be the greatest poet of the age after Yeats, Lewis was always hostile to poets. Betjeman introduced Louis MacNeice to him with the words ‘He doesn’t say much, but he’s a great poet.’ It prompted in Lewis the immediate feeling that MacNeice was ‘absolutely silent and astonishingly ugly’.8 He had a rooted antipathy to T. S. Eliot which, even after they had bo
th become famous as defenders of the faith and brothers in Christ, was still hard to shake off.

  When Betjeman failed his Divinity exams at the end of his first year, it would have been open to his tutor to plead for him with the College so that he could resit these comparatively unimportant exams and stay on at the University. Lewis let Betjeman sink. Betjeman recalled the moment in his autobiographical poem, Summoned by Bells:

  I sought my tutor in his arid rooms,

  Who told me, ‘You’d have only got a third.’

  Betjeman always loathed Lewis thereafter, though as they got older they both tried to make a bit of a joke about it.

  In the spring of 1926, Lewis’s own secret career as a poet took a great stride forward as he completed his long narrative poem Dymer. He had been working on it ever since the end of the war, and showing it in whole or in part to his friends. Harwood, when he had read Canto II, had ‘danced for joy’, and Barfield had a very high opinion of the work. Reading Dymer today, it is hard to see why. It reads like Masefield on a very bad day; and one uses the word ‘reads’ with caution, since few people in recent times, except Lewis enthusiasts anxious to have read their way through the entire canon, can ever have bothered to press on with Dymer.

  He had been meditating on the parricidal theme which runs through Dymer since he was a pupil of Kirkpatrick’s. Versions of it in prose and rhyme had been written up while he was still at Gastons. After meeting Mrs Moore, the theme of a powerful female entered the story –