C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  But did I say that he travels on the bus alone? Nothing could be further from the truth. For he is surrounded by a whole collection of grotesque egotists, struggling to hold on to their damnable selves. At times one feels that it is hard (as it is in Dante himself) to distinguish between qualities which are indeed damnable, and ones which our author merely happens to find distasteful. The modernist bishop; the Lady Macbeth of the Suburbs who forced her husband to ‘better himself and, having driven him to a nervous breakdown, longs to have him with her in Hell so that she can give him another chance to be ‘improved’; the old woman who is literally possessed by grumbling to the point where she has almost stopped being a woman and just become a grumble; the belligerent man who ‘only wants his rights’ – these are among the best and most savagely misanthropic portraits Lewis ever drew. The side of his genius which, from early childhood, enjoyed ‘collecting’ the infuriating absurdities of the grown-ups, and had, since prep-school days, been creating monsters such as Oldie and the P’daytabird, here comes into its own. The Great Divorce shows Lewis at his very best; it is something approaching a masterpiece.

  Though it seems paradoxical to say so, the Second World War was one of the happiest periods of C. S. Lewis’s life. It had provided a very welcome disruption to the quotidian routines of Kilns and college. It had introduced him to new audiences in RAF stations and at the Universities of Wales and Durham and, above all, to the huge audiences who heard and responded to his wireless talks. Had he wished to make a fortune, this would have brought him one. It certainly brought him fame, and a huge readership for the books which now seemed to flow abundantly from his pen. For the Inklings as a whole, it had been a fructiferous time – producing The Figure of Beatrice, All Hallows Eve, The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, The Abolition of Man and The Great Divorce. Any group of men sitting in a pub who could boast a comparable list of books in the space of four or five years could declare themselves indeed ‘a nest of singing birds’.

  Above all, it had been a time of friendship. But even before the war finished it was clear that 1945 would be a year of losses, endings and partings. The first separation was at home. After any number of delays and procrastinations it was decided that the time had come for June Flewett to take up her place at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Much as she loved them all, it was not her destiny to be a skivvy at The Kilns for the rest of her life. It was June’s father who finally said that she must go. It was a sore wrench on both sides. Ever since September 1944, Jack had been steeling himself for it. ‘Every argument which my mind brings against this conclusion I regard as a temptation,’ he told her parents. ‘And since in talking to June it is no use to appeal to selfish motives (she is, without exception, the most selfless person I have ever known) I told her that she has a duty [to her parents]. June’s own view is simply and definitely that she will not leave here of her own free will.’20

  In the event, Lewis paid for her training as an actress, giving her an allowance to cover fees and maintenance not only for the two years while she was at the Academy, but also for a year afterwards. ‘No gratitude or affection or life long interest which Mrs. Moore and I can feel will ever be adequate to the extraordinary goodness she has shown.’ She went on 3 January. On the fourth, Lewis wrote to June’s mother:

  Oh what a sad waking up this morning when we realised that June was gone! … Tell June that the hens were asking for her first thing this morning; that Warnie is even more depressed than usual; that the cats, under this shared calamity, sank their common differences and slept, mutually embracing, in the same box … We are the ghost and ruin of a house [sic] … Ichabod, Ichabod! God bless her (Indeed that is what I keep on telling him).21

  With June gone, the domestic responsibility was now placed firmly on Jack’s shoulders once again. Warnie sought periodic relief for his greater than usual depressions in the whiskey bottle; and Minto, now in some pain, was getting no easier with the passing months, either as a patient to be nursed, or as a taskmistress who dictated the chores. That did not mean that there were not occasional happy interludes, however, particularly since, with her increased inactivity, she had become much more bookish. She read the whole of War and Peace in 1945 and thoroughly enjoyed it.22

  If June’s departure left The Kilns ‘the ruin of a house’, there was to be a still more dramatic departure from the Inklings circle, which led ultimately to the breaking of the fellowship. The war ended on 8 May, and the next day Charles Williams was suddenly seized with pain. He was operated on at the Acland Nursing Home, only four hundred yards north of the regular Tuesday meeting-place, the Eagle and Child. Before going to the pub as usual, Lewis looked in at the Acland to ask how Williams had survived the operation. None of his friends had had any idea that it was serious.

  The hospital staff told him that Williams was dead. ‘The very streets looked different’ to him as he walked away. The hospital had rung Lewis’s college rooms but only managed to reach Warnie, who was sitting there working on French history and whose immediate reaction was to go out to the King’s Arms, a pub which he had last visited with Williams, and the sight of which immediately quickened his own sense of loss.

  As one would expect of Williams, for whom the Other Side was quite as real as this world, he did not go away immediately after he had shuffled off this mortal coil. At the funeral, in the beautiful cemetery of St Cross where so many great Oxford figures lie, Dyson remarked, ‘It is not blasphemous to believe that what was true of Our Lord is, in its lesser degree, true of all who are in Him. They go away in order to be with us in a new way, even closer than before.’23 Lewis discovered that ‘all that talk about “feeling that he is closer to us than before” isn’t just talk. It is just what it does feel like – I can’t put it into words. One seems at moments to be living in a new world. Lots, lots of pain, but not a particle of depression or resentment.’24

  It was partly in memory of Williams and partly to celebrate the ending of the war that it was decided to have a ‘Victory’ Inklings – a holiday at the beautiful Gloucestershire village of Fairford. They booked rooms at the Bull Inn for the second week of December, by which time it was assumed and hoped that College entrance exams would be marked and a lull in the domestic routines could be enjoyed before Christmas. Warnie and Tolkien set out for Fairford on the Tuesday morning, and Jack came the next day. He was not, as had been arranged, accompanied by Barfield, for Barfield was ill. Havard came over from Oxford by car and had lunch with them and afterwards they all walked through the hamlets of Horcott and Whelford. In the little church at Whelford, Tolkien amazed and pleased the brothers, at this period when Roman Catholics were forbidden to pray in Anglican churches, by kneeling and praying. It was a holiday which had to it the feel of something coming to an end. Coln St Aldwyn, where they walked on the Friday, seemed like a ‘dream village’. There was a pub called the Pig and Whistle where they had early drinks. But the train back to Oxford was at 2.12, and they had to run to catch it. ‘As if our holiday had intended to end then, the sky clouded over and the world became dim: the curtain had fallen most dramatically on our jaunt.’25

  –FIFTEEN–

  NARNIA

  1945–1951

  Peacetime Oxford was in many ways less peaceful than wartime Oxford. There were more undergraduates, and that meant more teaching. More tutorials, more college meetings; more of all the things which kept Lewis away from his three chief pleasures in life – reading, writing and seeing his friends.

  At forty-seven, he was getting a bit old for the all-boys-together raucousness of the English binges which he still insisted on holding at regular intervals for his pupils: the same readings aloud from Amanda McKittrick Ros, the same roaring of bawdry, the same insistence that his pupils be drunk before the evening was over. Many of them found it embarrassing, and he was acutely aware of this. Staggering out to the urinals during one ‘binge’, he stood beside a pupil who had returned from the war badly shot up. Fixing the young man with an inebr
iated stare, Lewis remarked, ‘You don’t like me much, do you?’ Since the remark was absolutely true, the young man did not know how to reply.1

  But for each pupil who did not like Lewis much, there were probably ten who did like him very much indeed, and who valued not only his qualities of mind, but also his inspiration on a personal level. One such, as his friends were sometimes surprised to discover, was Kenneth Tynan, destined to be the most famous avant-garde theatre critic of his generation, the discoverer if not inventor of Angry Young Men, kitchen-sink drama, and the all-nude revue Ob Calcutta! Anyone less likely to be a C. S. Lewis admirer it would have been hard to find, but from the moment he came up to Magdalen in the Michaelmas Term of 1945, Tynan was devoted to his tutor. Though disconcerted by Lewis’s habit of walking next door to his bedroom to relieve himself into a chamber pot, sometimes while still talking, Tynan was early aware not only of his tutor’s wisdom but also of his kindness. Because Tynan had a marked stammer, Lewis used to read his essays aloud for him, and ‘It became quite a test writing essays that could survive being read in that wonderfully resonant voice.’2 When he was laid low by bronchitis and an unhappy love affair, Tynan asked if he could delay taking his final examinations, and confided in Lewis that he saw no reason to go on living. Lewis was bracing in just the right spirit. During the war, he reminded Tynan, a bomb had fallen in Birmingham narrowly missing Tynan’s house. ‘You have had eight years of life that you had no reason to expect. How can you be so ungrateful?’ When Tynan did eventually die, in 1980, he asked for his ashes to be buried at Magdalen. The college refused, but the ashes were interred nearby in St Cross cemetery – in the same burial ground as, among many others, Kenneth Grahame, Hugo Dyson and Charles Williams. By Tynan’s special request, Lewis’s words were read as he was returned to the earth:

  These things – the beauty, the memory of our own past – are good images of what we really desire: but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never visited.3

  Tynan responded, as did the majority of his pupils, to a recognizable and tangible greatness in the man.

  Lord David Cecil, eventually to become the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at New College and famous as a literary biographer, always seized upon this fact when he spoke of Lewis. He was a great man. You felt you were in the presence – as Samuel Johnson’s friends did – of someone who made his contemporaries seem like pygmies. David Cecil would comment on the agility of Lewis’s mind, its immense fund of reading and reflection, and its bedrock of common sense. Lewis was also great fun. John Buxton, who had come back to New College after the war to teach English Literature with David Cecil, always enjoyed Lewis’s visits to the college, not least because of their shared interest in the sixteenth century, and shared love of Spenser and Sidney. ‘He had the extraordinary gift’, Buxton remembers, ‘of instant parody. It was not prepared as a party piece – it came out naturally.’ He could parody any author – ‘Spenser, Kipling, anyone’.4 But Oxford is a strange place, and dons are strange people. Brilliance in a colleague is quite as likely to excite their envy as their esteem, and, where mediocrity is the norm, it is not long before mediocrity becomes the ideal.

  Tolkien in 1945 had told his son Christopher that his ambition was ‘to get C.S.L. and myself into the 2 Merton Chairs’.5 He was to achieve his own ambition of moving to Merton in 1945. But the Merton Chair of English Literature was to elude Lewis. In 1947 its occupant, David Nicholl Smith, retired, and Lewis assumed that he would be at least eligible, if not the likeliest candidate. He was weary of the repetitive round of undergraduate tutorials, and he disliked his colleagues at Magdalen. But even apart from these negative considerations, he considered himself worthy of the job. He was a popular and distinguished lecturer; and the job of an Oxford professor consisted very largely of lecturing in those days before the huge increase in graduate students needing supervisors for their doctoral dissertations. The other part of a professor’s job was – as it still is – to be involved in the administration of the Faculty.

  Lewis was unaware of quite how unpopular he was in the English Faculty at Oxford, and indeed in the University at large. There would have been no chance of his being elected to the Merton Chair even though The Allegory of Love and A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’ (quite apart from other lectures and learned articles which he had written to date) were far more interesting and distinguished than anything which his rivals for the job had produced. They, however, were safe men, worthy dullards: and that is usually the sort of man that dons will promote. It was not Lewis but his old tutor, F. P. Wilson, who got the Merton Chair in 1947-8: a thoroughly worthy Shakespearean scholar who could be relied upon not to cause trouble, and not to embarrass his colleagues by writing books about Christianity. Even colleagues who were Christians found Lewis’s career as a popularizer embarrassing, ‘not quite the thing’. And they noticed that his variety of Christianity did not extend to meekness, or even necessarily to politeness, towards his colleagues.

  An example of this occurred about now at a heated English Faculty meeting where syllabus reform was under discussion. Lewis’s and Tolkien’s syllabus, stopping in 1832, was coming under strong attack from younger members of the Faculty. Helen Gardner, the English Fellow at St Hilda’s, was among those who felt strongly that the syllabus should extend at least as far as 1900; and that there was a kind of absurdity in the idea of students who had ‘read English’ at Oxford going away after three years without having read Tennyson, Browning, William Morris, Dickens, Thackeray or George Eliot. Lewis, in roaring police-court style, defended ‘his’ syllabus with great paradox and gusto. It was precisely because he valued the nineteenth century above all others in literature that he thought it was an unsuitable subject for undergraduate study. It was too big. How could you understand it if you merely read bits of its poets, and a few novels? You needed to be aware of all the intellectual ferment of the period, to read Carlyle, Newman, Herbert Spencer, John Stewart Mill – and what undergraduate would have the time to read all these?

  Not to be outdone, Helen Gardner was on her feet to respond to this. ‘If Mr Lewis takes the line that it is improper to read the literature of the period without a thorough knowledge of all the intellectual background, does this argument not extend to all periods of literature? In the area of the sixteenth century, for example, which of us has pupils who have read Calvin’s Institutes of Religion?’

  Carried away by the heat of the debate, Lewis replied, ‘Well, my pupils have all read Calvin.’

  His eyes met Miss Gardner’s. He knew that she knew that he was lying.

  Lewis must have heard of her churchgoing habits from their mutual friend Charles Williams, or seen that in her criticisms she wrote overtly as a Christian. For after the meeting he came up to her and said, by way of an apology, ‘In spite of our disagreements over the syllabus, I know that you and I agree about the most important things in life. Would you care to dine with me one day?’

  Helen Gardner said that she would like to dine and – rather unusually – she was duly invited not to Magdalen, but to dinner at The Kilns. The squalor of the house was something which she found little to her taste. She was astonished to find that there was no object or picture at which one could gaze with pleasure, and that the furniture was bleak and uncomfortable. There was quite a party, and she was nervous, being the only woman at the table (Mrs Moore was in bed), and the only person there who was not an old friend of Lewis.

  Conversation at the table turned on the interesting question of whom, after death, those present should most look forward to meeting. One person suggested he would like to meet Shakespeare; another said St Paul. ‘But you, Jack,’ said the friends (or, as Helen Gardner felt, the disciples), ‘who would be your choice?’

  ‘Oh, I have no difficulty i
n deciding,’ said Lewis. ‘I want to meet Adam.’ He went on to explain why, very much in the terms outlined in A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’, where he wrote:

  Adam was, from the first, a man in knowledge as well as in stature. He alone of all men ‘had been in Eden, in the garden of God, he had walked up and down in the midst of the stones of fire’. He was endowed, says Athanasius, with ‘a vision of God so far-reaching that he could contemplate the eternity of the Divine Essence and the coming operations of His Word’. He was ‘a heavenly being’ according to St. Ambrose, who breathed the aether and was accustomed to converse with God ‘face to face’.

  Be that as it may, Adam is not likely, if she has anything to do with it, to converse with Helen Gardner. She ventured to say so. Even, she told Lewis, if there really were, historically, someone whom we could name as ‘the first man’, he would be a Neanderthal ape-like figure, whose conversation she could not conceive of finding interesting.

  A stony silence fell on the dinner table. Then Lewis said gruffly, ‘I see we have a Darwinian in our midst.’6

  Helen Gardner was never invited again. Another Oxford woman with whom Lewis famously crossed swords at this period was Elizabeth Anscombe, the philosopher. This was a contretemps of much graver importance in Lewis’s imaginative life. It was one of those landmarks which, like other Romantic egoists before him, Lewis used as a way of punctuating or mastering experience. The death of his mother was perhaps the first of these great mythological moments, sealing off, had he but known it, a greater part of his capacity to love, and internalizing much of his capacity to suffer. The reading of Phantasies had suggested to the adolescent with No Way that there was the possibility of recovering some of this agonizing loss through the exercise of the imagination; that the imagination, as Plato had believed, gave to human beings the chance to penetrate other worlds, to recover earlier states of being, and ultimately to see God. All exercises of memory, all harking back, thus became voyages of not just self-discovery but discovery of the nature of things. Through the emotional ups and downs of life with the P’daytabird and later with Minto, Lewis as a young man kept these ideas at bay, until, as it seemed, the Other World intruded upon his own and would not be resisted. Then came the other great mythological moments – his submission to God in the year that his father died; his acceptance of the idea of Christ’s incarnation after the visit to Whipsnade Zoo.