C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  It was therefore an important moment when Tolkien gave Lewis the Lay of Leithian to read in manuscript.7 It has been said that Lewis’s expressed distaste for the poetry of his contemporaries, such as MacNeice and Eliot, was based on jealousy. Tolkien, when he read this suggestion after Lewis’s death – and after his own relationship with Lewis had become less than happy – rejected it as entirely unworthy. He knew that Lewis was a greater man than that. From personal experience, he knew that Lewis could be a generous, though by no means an uncritical, reader of contemporary poetry. Lewis wrote to Tolkien:

  I sat up late last night and read the Geste as far as to where Beren and his gnomish allies defeat the patrol of orcs above the sources of the Narog and disguise themselves in the reaf [Old English: ‘garments, weapons taken from the slain’]. I can quite honestly say that it is ages since I have had an evening of such delight; and the personal interest of reading a friend’s work had very little to do with it. I should have enjoyed it just as well if I’d picked it up in a bookshop, by an unknown author. The two things that come out clearly are the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value.8

  Lewis had seen, almost more clearly, one suspects, than the author himself saw, what was the essence of Tolkien. In order to draw this out of him, he wrote a vastly elaborate commentary on the Lay, softening the blow of his harsher criticisms by inventing the personae of a whole group of scholarly editors who are debating the text in the way that scholars have disputed over Homer or Beowulf. It would seem that Tolkien took a great deal of notice of Lewis’s invented editors, for he rewrote his Lay and incorporated a high proportion of their emendations. The device was a clever one on Lewis’s part, for since he was seven years younger than Tolkien and a relatively junior member of a faculty in which ‘Tollers’ was a professor, there was the need to tread carefully. It was not simply a question of age and hierarchy. Tolkien was by temperament a very different man from Lewis. He could be touchy and irritable; Lewis could be brash and tactless. There was a touch of elfish melancholy, as well as of delicacy, in Tolkien which would never respond to the broader outlines of Lewis’s essentially sunny disposition. Lewis would not have guessed that Tolkien’s Lay would remain unfinished. It must have seemed clear to him at once that Tolkien was a man of literary genius, and this fact only brought home to him his own sense of failure as a writer. ‘From the age of sixteen onwards, I had one single ambition, from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment; and I recognise myself as having unmistakeably failed in it.’9 He knew that as yet the appropriate style eluded him. He knew neither what to write nor how to write it. In Tolkien, by huge contrast, he met a man whose style had been with him from the beginning.

  Lewis responded so warmly to Tolkien’s imagined world because, as he wrote to Arthur Greeves, ‘he is, in one part of him, what we were.’10 That is to say, Tolkien’s stories could be said to be an embodiment of that Northernness with which Lewis and Greeves had been in love since early adolescence. Lewis was subtle enough to see that this was at best a half-truth, and perhaps he was beginning to sense that what Tolkien’s friendship had to offer him was something rather more important than a regress to the nursery. For Tolkien, whose literary pilgrimage was to be so lonely, and whose return to Oxford had not been marked by great domestic happiness, there was something very cheering in the company of this clever, widely read, humorous and spontaneously affectionate Irishman. When he reflected with sadness on the unhappiness of his marriage towards the end of 1929, he noted, ‘Friendship with Lewis compensates for much.’11

  The death of Albert Lewis inevitably involved his two sons in practical decisions. What was to be the future of their house in Belfast? Where would Warnie live? How much money would be available to them when the probate of the estate had been completed?

  The decision to sell Little Lea more or less made itself. Jack could not possibly run the house from Oxford, and Warnie was still a serving officer in the Army. When he came home on leave in April 1930, they both returned to their childhood home and made all the necessary arrangements for its sale. It was ‘perfectly beastly’, as Warnie said in his diary, to see ‘P’s grave with its fresh turned earth and a handful of withered daffodils at its head alongside Mamy’s’.12 It was also a shock to discover that their father’s investments only yielded an income of some £190 per annum net, considerably less than Warnie (desperate to leave the Army and live on his pension) had been hoping. The house, thought to be worth about £3,000 by the lawyers, in fact went for less.

  Not the least of their tasks was the disposal of the toys. They decided in the end to bury the trunk of ‘characters’ from Animal-land unopened. A huge hole was dug in the vegetable patch for the purpose. After several days of dividing their possessions into things they wished to keep and things which could be given away or sold, they were ready to leave the house for the last time. It was a tremendous wrench, one from which Warnie never truly recovered. One of his last acts was to heave the contents of the wine cellar (some bottles of whiskey) into the back of a relative’s car. Clearly the whereabouts of those bottles, and the number of them, had been one of the P’daytabird’s little secrets, for Warnie writes, ‘Nothing brought home to me the finality of the old life as did the carrying out of those bottles and putting them into [the] car – to see the mysteries of that jealously guarded secret room emerge as plain matter of fact bottles, and the cellar stand revealed as an ordinary empty cupboard was an unpleasant feeling.’13

  Jack wrote a poem to Warnie, urging him not to look back out of the car window as it hurtled away, leaving their childhood behind them.

  Yet look not out. Think rather, ‘When from France

  And those old German wars we came back here

  Already it was the mind’s swift haunting glance

  Towards the further past, that made time dear.’

  Then to that further past, still up the stream

  Ascend and think of some divine first day

  In holidays from school. Even there the gleam

  Of earlier memory like enchantment lay.

  Already, the germ is present which was to flower most fully in The Last Battle: the idea of school holidays being a mere Platonic shadow of our permanent refreshment in Paradise, of our earthly homes being but a reflection of heaven.

  But in the immediate future, it was the search for an earthly home which preoccupied them. Jack had very decided misgivings about Minto’s impulsive suggestion that Warnie should live with them. To Warnie, he had written a letter full of the gravest admonitions, designed to make him think carefully about what he was committing himself to.

  Can you stand as a permanency our cuisine – Maureen’s practising – Maureen’s sulks – Minto’s burnettodesmondism – Minto’s mare’s nests – the perpetual interruptions of family life – the partial loss of liberty? This sounds as if I were either sick of it myself or else trying to make you sick of it; but neither is the case. I have definitely chosen and I don’t regret the choice. What I hope – very much hope – is that you, after consideration, may make the same choice.14

  But the thought of sharing his Minto-life with Warnie was not without its complications for Jack himself. In a letter to Arthur Greeves, he said that Warnie and Mrs Moore liked each other, ‘and, I hope, as W. gets broken into domestic life, they may come to do so still more: but in the interval there is a ticklish time ahead and in any case it is a big sacrifice of our … ’ At this point the manuscript breaks off. Greeves, in pencil, has written ‘very private’ and ‘to be burnt’ at the top of the letter and the following pages of it are missing. The letter concludes, ‘You are my only real Father Confessor.’

  Warnie, no sophisticate in emotional matters, found Jack’s relationship with Janie Moore incomprehensible. Jack ‘commonly referred to Mrs Moore as “my mother”’. On the only occasion when Warnie tried to probe Jack on the origin or true nature of his
relationship with Minto he was shut up with great vehemence.15

  There is enough recorded in Warnie’s diaries over the next twenty years of friction and domestic misery to make us see why Jack had misgivings about the advisability of their all attempting to live together. The factor which clinched their decision was the discovery of a house which they could only afford to buy if all three pooled their resources.

  After long years of living in unsatisfactory rented accommodation, it now looked as if Jack and Minto could afford a place of their own. They first set eyes on the house which was to be ‘home’ for the rest of Jack’s life on 7 July 1930. Minto was ‘more excited’ than Warnie had ever seen her when he returned from Aldershot for week-end leave, happy to leave behind him his fellow-officers, whom he nicknamed the Aldershits. When Jack took him to see the house, Warnie was just as enthusiastic. ‘I instantly caught the infection.’16 The house itself was unimpressive, little more than a low-lying cottage of modern design which would not easily accommodate four grown-up people. In order to make it suitable, Minto believed that it would be necessary to build on at least two extra rooms. What made it so enchanting was the setting. The gardens and grounds covered eight acres, nestling at the northern foot of Shotover Hill. The house took its name – The Kilns – from the two old brick kilns which stood by its side. Further in, towards the base of the hill, was a wood, within which were one large pool and several smaller ones, formed by the hollowing-out of the old stone quarries in a previous century. It was said that the poet Shelley had been here to sail paper boats. ‘Many a £10,000 house is worse situated and has a much poorer garden,’ Warnie observed. The asking price was £3,500.

  This was a considerable sum of money. The sort of modest suburban house which Mrs Moore was renting at the time could be purchased in those days for £850 or £1,000. The Lewises’ substantial house in Belfast was finally sold for £2,300, seven months after their purchase of The Kilns. Minto airily spoke of being worth £1,000 and able to raise a further £2,000 as a mortgage, but this was not the case. Upon investigation, it was discovered that her Aslans inheritance, held in trust, enabled her to have a mortgage of just £1,500.

  Dons, in those days, did not reckon on buying houses, still less on having mortgages. The huge majority of them lived in rented houses in North Oxford. The Kilns venture was highly unusual, and the Lewis brothers knew that they could only afford it by taking the great risk of throwing in their lot together; in the event the purchase price was lowered to £3,300. Warnie paid the cash deposit of £300, and raised a mortgage of £500, Minto’s trustees put up a mortgage of £1,500, and Jack raised a mortgage of £1,000.17 On this precarious basis, life at The Kilns began – and the distinctive Lewisian habitat had been established.

  Surprised by Joy, limited by the necessarily artificial conventions of autobiography, gives an impression that the development of Lewis’s religious opinions was much more cut and dried than was really the case. He gives us a picture of a firm conversion to theism in the summer of 1929, followed by a period in which he believed in God, but not in the doctrines of Christianity. Then, in the late summer of 1931, he writes that he passed definitely from this position of ‘rational theism’ into a full acceptance of the Christian dispensation.

  While not exactly false, this simple version of his spiritual growth gives no picture of the tremendous vacillations in his faith which he confided to Arthur Greeves during this period. For example, in his attempt to lead a new life, he attributes any success he may have had in conquering lust, anger or pride to God’s grace, a very specifically Christian idea; and this is a full fifteen months before his conversion to Christianity. Anything which smacks of an incarnational theology, he eschews. That is to say he is not in the least drawn to the idea that Christ came in the flesh, and he finds the simplicity and literalism of what might be termed ‘mere Christianity’ frankly unacceptable. To Greeves, the orthodox believer, he wrote in January 1930, ‘In spite of all my recent changes of view I am still inclined to think that you can only get what you call Christ out of the Gospels by picking and choosing and slurring over a good deal.’18 The authors he found most helpful in this ‘interim’ period were all mystics, or figures who emphasized spirit over matter – MacDonald, William Ralph Inge, Jacob Boehme, whose quasi-theosophical, semi-astrological De Signatura Rerum (The Signature of Things) gave him ‘about the biggest shaking up I’ve got from a book, since I first read Phantastes’.19 But such moments of uplift as were provided by the mystics could not prevent Lewis’s common-sense humility from seeing ‘how much of one’s philosophy and religion are mere talk’.20 When in college, he had begun to attend chapel (i.e. the prayer-book office of morning prayer) each day. It could not prevent him from having doubts. ‘I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of the age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address.’21

  For those who are familiar with Lewis’s literary persona, as for the much smaller number of people who knew him in life, his acceptance of an orthodox Christian position seems in an almost literal sense fitting. There are certain clothes we feel comfortable in and which we would wear in preference to all others. On this level of mere temperamental affinity (not considering its truth or falsehood) we feel Lewis to be a man who would be most happy in Christian garb. There is no doubt that until he discovered this clothing (be it artificial carapace or ‘the whole armour of God’), Lewis was only half-formed as a writer, as a literary imagination, perhaps as a person. Many readers of his apologetics must have been disconcerted by the fact that his chapter about conversion in Beyond Personality is entitled ‘Let’s Pretend’. He suggests that the moment you ‘make a shot at saying your prayers’ and say ‘Our Father’ you are ‘dressing up as Christ … That is why children’s games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.’22

  This process of ‘let’s pretend’ took an irreversible step forward one September night in 1931, when Lewis was entertaining J. R. R. Tolkien to dinner at Magdalen. He had also asked Henry Victor Dyson, a lecturer at Reading University who had been an exact contemporary of Tolkien’s as an undergraduate at Exeter College. Like Tolkien, Dyson (known to all his friends as Hugo) was a Christian – though he was a High Anglican while Tolkien was Roman Catholic. Lewis had got to know him because he was a frequent visitor to Oxford, anxious to get a job in the Oxford English Faculty, and a friend not only of Tolkien but also of Nevill Coghill. Dyson was a beguilingly witty man, handsome and bright-eyed, whose talk was a flow of fantasy, keen literary appreciation and occasional learning. Like many Oxford men, he belonged to the strong Socratic tradition in which dialogue was esteemed as highly as the written word. As the years went by, and some of his friends became prolific writers, Dyson came to be jealous of their reputations and to scorn what they wrote. He himself published almost nothing. In 1931, however, they were all still comparatively innocent as far as publication was concerned. Lewis had his two slender volumes of verse, and Tolkien his learned edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and his article on Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meith-had (which combines deep linguistic learning with a justly famous account of the world of this West Midland prose writer which we can recognize as a foretaste of the Hobbit’s native Shire). These were hardly a threat to Dyson’s rhetorical skills. Dyson, besides, though unpublished and ‘a don at Reading’ (as he always half-ironically described himself) rather than at Oxford, was more a man of the world than either Tolkien or Lewis. He had been a friend of Lawrence of Arabia; he knew Ottoline Morrell, at whose house Garsington Manor he had met Virginia Woolf, Bertrand Russell and D. H. Lawrence, among others. The combination of Tolkien a
nd Dyson was therefore a formidable one. After dinner the talk fell to the great question which was uppermost in Lewis’s mind: that question being, in the words of his pupil Betjeman, ‘and is it true, and is it true, this most tremendous tale of all?’

  Owen Barfield, both in conversation and in writing, had already gone a long way in revealing to Lewis the fallacy of making sharp distinctions between ‘myth’ and ‘fact’. In his book Poetic Diction he had pointed out that in earlier times, those who first used language did not necessarily distinguish between ‘metaphorical’ and ‘literal’ uses of words. The Latin spiritus, for example, means breath. Modern rationalists might wish to distinguish between the ‘meaning’ of ‘spirit in some elevated sense’ and that of ‘merely breath’. But early users of the language would not have made such a distinction. When the wind blew it was not ‘like’ someone breathing. It was the breath of a divinity.

  This powerfully confirmed the way in which Tolkien had been accustoming himself to think about the world ever since he grew to manhood. One of the great distinctions in his mythology is made between the Elves, who are ‘animist’ and ‘pagan’, and the Men, who are destined to move beyond this. The Elves, who will never leave the material universe and do not know what happens to Men when they die, are embodiments of language-users for whom the breath-wind-spirit distinction would be meaningless. By contrast, God willed that ‘the hearts of Men should seek beyond the world and should find no rest therein’.23

  In his dialogue with Lewis that September night, Tolkien was really arguing for a less human and more ‘elven’ approach to the Gospel story. Lewis complained that he could not see any personal relevance for himself in the story of Christ. ‘What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now – except in so far as his example helped us.’ Tolkien pointed out that this was, as much as anything, an imaginative failure on Lewis’s part. When Lewis came across myths of dying and reviving gods, he was moved. When he read stories about Balder, Adonis and Bacchus, he was prepared to ‘feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant”’. He stopped short of understanding Christianity because when he thought about that, he laid aside the receptive imagination with which he allowed himself to appreciate myth and became rigidly narrow and empiricist. He should understand that ‘the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way.’24