C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  In the event, this devotee married Mr Lindskoog. Not that being married necessarily deterred Lewis’s penfriends from hope. A case in point was the experience of Mrs Joy Gresham of Westchester, New York State, who had been converted to Christianity in 1946, and began corresponding with Lewis on 10 January 1950. ‘Just got a letter from Lewis in the mail,’ Mrs Gresham remarked to her cousin Renée Pierce at the time. ‘I think I told you I’d raised an argument or two on some points? Lord, he knocked my props from under me unerringly; one shot to a pigeon.’5 Evidently, she derived some emotional satisfaction from having the sheer illogicality of her letters exploded by the great man himself. ‘Being disposed of so neatly by a master of debate, all fair and square – it seems to be one of the great pleasures of life.’ Since this was precisely the period in Oxford when Lewis was beginning to have his doubts about the value of verbal fisticuffs, and when he was still licking the wounds inflicted by Miss Anscombe at the Socratic Club, it was reassuring to be able to provide such satisfaction as he could to these unseen ladies across the water.

  But whereas in books it does not really matter where fantasy ends and reality begins, in the dangerous game of letter-writing to strangers, the reader can actually hit back at the artist, or involve herself-if she chooses and he lets her – in his fantasy. Renée Pierce became convinced, the more she saw of Joy Gresham at this period, that her cousin was falling in love with Lewis, even though she had never seen him.6

  Joy Gresham was thirty-five when she started writing to Lewis. She was small – five foot two inches in height – highly animated and emotional, and trying to make her way in the world as a poet and novelist. One of her earliest literary triumphs was to win the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize at Hunter College, New York City, where she was a student in 1934.7 At Hunter, her closest friend was the future novelist Bel Kaufman, who recalled that ‘Joy seldom dated. When she did go out, her escorts were older men seriously interested in literature.’8 This taste for literary old gentlemen was to take a long while to satisfy, and her life’s journey took some wild swoops before she arrived in this story. Leaving Hunter in the Depression years Joy (née Davidman), like many East Coast would-be intellectuals of the period, was drawn to Communism and eventually joined the party. Equally of its period was her desire to get involved with writing for the movies. When she was twenty-seven, she married a handsome man called Bill Gresham, whose first novel Nightmare Alley was sold for $60,000 to Hollywood, instantly lifting them from the pauperism of life in a cramped little apartment in East 22nd Street, New York City, to the gracious lifestyle of country dwellers at Pleasant Plains, near Staatsburg.

  But in spite of having two children in swift succession – David born in 1944 and Douglas in 1945 – all was not well with the Gresham marriage. Bill Gresham was an alcoholic and a compulsive womanizer. Devastated by the discovery of yet another of her husband’s infidelities six months after Douglas was born, Joy had a religious experience. ‘All my defences – the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God – went down momentarily – and God came in.’9

  For a time, Bill Gresham went along with the new religious phase: but for him, Christianity was only a phase. It was not long before he had admitted to her that ‘I am not a Christian and will probably never be one since I cannot understand the basic doctrines nor accept them.’ He also admitted to her that, yet again, he had been unfaithful. As Joy’s biographer remarks, ‘Bill Gresham’s growing away from Christianity is a real-life example of Christ’s parable of the seed falling on rocky soil.’ By February 1951, Joy had brought an end to the physical side of her relationship with Bill Gresham,10 and the correspondence with Lewis – who could, at this stage, have had no conception of the amount of emotional capital Joy was investing in it – continued to flourish.

  In September 1952, she crossed the Atlantic.

  The death of Minto in January 1951 had provided necessary emotional punctuation in Lewis’s life, an opportunity to start again from childhood. In May 1952, there was another death, obviously less momentous, but not without significance in the story that follows. Father Walter Adams SSJE died while saying Mass on 17 May. His last words as he fell backwards on the altar steps were ‘I am coming, Lord Jesus.’

  For ten years, he had been what Lewis called ‘my old directeur’. For those not acquainted with the ways of Anglican piety, it is worth dwelling on the phrase. Not all Anglicans go to confession and, of those who do, not all have a regular confessor, still less anyone they would describe as their spiritual director. The majority, probably, simply go to confession at a time when there happens to be a priest available in church, and the whole transaction is totally impersonal. The priest would not necessarily know who his penitents were, let alone anything about their past lives. In such a case, he would merely be pronouncing God’s forgiveness for the itemized sins committed since the penitent’s last confession.

  For those who choose to have a spiritual director, it is all a bit different. The director is not necessarily the same person as the confessor, though in Lewis’s case he was. The director is a man (or woman) who gets to know the ‘client’ personally, and advises him not only about his life of prayer, but also about his conduct of life in general, including how often, if ever, he should go to confession. (Baron von Hügel, the great Roman Catholic lay theologian, who was the spiritual director to the Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill, used to advise her never to go to confession. I mention the example to establish the difference between a director and a confessor.)

  Though Lewis was to continue, for the rest of his life, to go to confession, he was deprived in 1952 of his spiritual director, and he never, properly speaking, took up with another, though Austin Fairer was evidently a close spiritual friend with whom it was possible to discuss some matters. Had Father Adams lived until, say, 1960, we do not know whether the following story would have been different. But without his presence to admonish and guide, Lewis must have felt both a little bereft and, in a sense, liberated. The Cowley Fathers at this period were all noted for the extreme strictness of their spiritual direction. ‘I owed him a great deal,’ Lewis said. ‘Everything he ever said to me was so simple that you might have thought it childish, but it was always what was needed.’11

  Not much imagination is needed to guess what Father Adams would have said about the arrival in Oxford of a 37-year-old married woman from New York who invited Lewis and his brother to luncheon at the Eastgate Hotel, just opposite Magdalen. Lewis clearly liked her, and asked her, in return, to lunch at Magdalen. This time, Warnie backed out of the meal, and Lewis asked along an old pupil, now a master at his old school Malvern, called George Sayer. Evidently, he was aware from the first that there was some inherent ‘danger’ in the situation, or he would not have gone out of his way to provide a chaperon on each occasion he saw Mrs Gresham. (It was very different from tea with Kathryn Stillwell, giddy with awe at the Royal Oxford Hotel; he knew he was safe with her.)

  Mrs Gresham returned to London, where she was staying, but some weeks later Lewis invited her to a slightly larger lunch party at Magdalen to meet his friends. Warnie’s verdict on this party, recorded some years later, was as follows:

  I was some little time in making up my mind about her: she proved to be a Jewess, or rather a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn rimmed specs, quite extraordinarily uninhibited. Our first meeting was at lunch in Magdalen, where she turned to me in the presence of three or four men, and asked in the most natural tone in the world, ‘Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?’ But her visit was a great success … 12

  Warnie’s diaries were written, it will be remembered, for the record; he knew that there was always the possibility that one day he would die and Jack would read them. And by the time he wrote these words he was genuinely fond of Joy. Her five foot two inches had become ‘medium’ height, though it is what some would call short. He had forgotten that
he first met her not with Dyson and the others at Magdalen, but with just Jack at the Eastgate Hotel. And, being a gentleman, he had considerably toned down the way she asked for the whereabouts of the lavatory. Others were present at the luncheon and noted her ‘lack of inhibition’, and found it embarrassing. She spoke habitually in language that most of those present associated more with their days in the Army than with a lunch in pleasant civilian surroundings in peacetime. There seemed something strident about her, as though – either from nerves, or extreme self-conceit, or both – she had to justify herself. Part of the point of saying ‘bloody’ and ‘fuck’ so often appeared to be in order to suggest that with Jack she was so much at ease that she could be herself. Or perhaps – ‘monastic establishment’ – she was genuinely under the impression that these were words her company did not know, or that she had a duty to shake them up a bit. She habitually spoke and wrote as if she were the first American, let alone the first Jewish American, to penetrate the hallowed cloisters of Oxford, and some of those who have written about Lewis seem to share this view, unaware of the fact that, since the time persecutions in Continental universities began in the 1930s, Oxford was fuller than most towns in the world of Jewish intellectuals, many of them holding fellowships of colleges including Magdalen. If Lewis’s friends at first took against Joy Gresham, and if their feelings of initial suspicion deepened into something like loadiing, one needs to look about for reasons other than her sex, race or place of birth.

  Whatever the others thought, Lewis was charmed. Far from finding her, as his friends did, foul-mouthed, bad-tempered and self-assertive, he found himself roaring with laughter at everything she said. He asked her to stay at The Kilns for Christmas, and she stayed a fortnight.

  She had now been away from her husband and children for four months, and while staying at The Kilns during that Christmas of 1952 she produced a letter from Bill informing her that he was in love with her cousin Renée. The optimum solution, he told her, would be for her, Joy, to be ‘married to some real swell guy, Renée and I to be married’ and ‘somehow arrange things so that the Gresham kids could have Mommy and Daddy on hand’. There is absolutely no way of knowing whether Joy had known about this ‘bombshell’ for some time. Her motives in apprising Lewis of the situation, during their Christmas together, would seem fairly clear. One of the last things he did before she sailed back to the United States was to take her to the pantomime. They laughed at ‘the oldest jokes’ and joined in the songs. ‘I’ll never forget Jack’, she recalled, ‘coming in loudly on something that went like this:

  Am I going to be a bad boy? No! no! no!

  Am I going to be awful? No! no! no!’

  There is something hugely touching about the idea of this large, red-faced man fifty-four years old shouting out a pantomime song designed for little boys. His second childhood had raced past while he wrote the Narnia books. Now he was on the threshold of an adventure which many people experience in their teens – a boy-girl relationship with a woman of his own age or younger. He could shout No, no, no! as loud as he liked. Mrs Gresham’s answer to the question of whether he was going to be ‘awful’ would have been very different, as she took the boat back to New York.

  As far as Lewis’s professional life was concerned, 1953 was dominated by his monumental literary history of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. He had been commissioned to write it by the Oxford University Press (at F. P. Wilson’s suggestion) over twelve years before, and – at almost 700 pages by far his longest work – it had been a tremendous effort. Some of it had been completed in 1944, when he read a few chapters as the Clark Lectures at Cambridge. But interruptions had been constant, not least the great emotional interruption of Tolkien’s distaste for the book, and the whole imaginative excitement of writing Narnia. At last it was done. In sheer magnitude, it is his biggest achievement, and it must rank as about the most entertaining work of criticism ever written. When he wrote to Sister Penelope in 1951 that he was ‘travelling across a Plain called Ease’, he could have been putting his finger on what makes the book so immensely attractive. It reads like a very clever and wise person talking about the things which concern him most. To this extent, it is one of the most truly Christian books he ever wrote: it gives us more of what is best in Lewis’s Christianity than do those where he has mounted the pulpit steps to proclaim the word. I am thinking of such sections as his description of The Book of Common Prayer, which reveals so much not only of the treasures of that book, but also of Lewis’s own piety.

  In the Prayer Book, that earnest age, not itself rich either in passion or in beauty, is matched in a most fruitful opposition with overwhelming material and with originals all but over-ripe in their artistry. It arrests them, binds them in strong syllables, strengthens them even by limitation as they in return erect and transfigure it. Out of that conflict the perfection springs. There are of course many good, and different, ways of praying. Its temper may seem cold to those reared in other traditions but no one will deny that it is strong. It offers little and concedes little to merely natural feelings: even religious feelings it will not heighten till it has first sobered them; but at its greatest it shines with a white light hardly surpassed outside the pages of the New Testament itself.13

  The chapters on ‘The Close of the Middle Ages in Scotland’ and on ‘Sidney and Spenser’ are perhaps the best. Of course, what makes the book unboring is what makes it, in the judgement of bores, unreliable. It offers the stimulation of good talk, and it is frequently opinionated. The idea that the ‘humanists’ of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century – More, Erasmus and Colet – were far less interesting than the late medieval thinkers whom they hoped to displace; the idea, indeed, that the Renaissance in England either did not happen or, if it did, that it was a Bad Thing, could not pass without other scholars attacking it. The discovery that ‘drab’ in this book means ‘good’ tells us much about Lewis and his aesthetic, but it is perverse. And there are, as readers of his life would expect, some very strange emotional lacunae. His bluff, Johnsonian ‘What man in the whole world, except a father or a potential father-in-law, cares whether any other man gets married?’ is a rhetorical question which invites the opposite answer to the one he wants. (He was writing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets to the Young Man; he was about to discover that, quite apart from extraordinary emotional entanglements such as the one chronicled in the Sonnets, a man’s friends can mind very much whether he gets married, and to whom.)

  In his autobiography, Lewis enunciates the great truth:

  Tea should be taken in solitude … for eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. Of course not all books are suitable for meal-time reading. It would be a kind of blasphemy to read poetry at table. What one wants is a gossipy formless book which can be opened anywhere … Boswell … Tristram Shandy, Elia and the Anatomy of Melancholy are all good for the same purpose.14

  To this illustrious list one would want to add his own English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Whether in its abundant (and often enjoyably questionable) epigrams, its golden or almost purple passages, its passionate enthusiasms, its magnificent unfairnesses, its gusto, or its overall common sense, it never fails as a book to read alone over a large cup of tea. It probably deserves much more learned appreciation than that but, in so far as a book can increase the sum of human pleasure, there are not many higher terms of praise. How many works of academic criticism or literary history would we look at twice, except for the purpose of checking a reference? Here is one which repays any number of enjoyable rereadings.

  In spite of those who cavilled at the peculiarity of its judgements, the book got a very good reception from the critics. One who reviewed it was A. L. Rowse, the Cornish fellow of All Souls who had achieved a name for himself as a leading authority on the sixteenth century and biographer of the Churchill family, and was still at that date a supporter of – and Parliamentary candidate for – the Labour Party. Rowse and Lewis had kn
own each other since 1926, when Lewis had Rowse to dinner at Magdalen. They had never been much one another’s ‘type’, and over the years their views had diverged. Indeed, during a public debate with Rowse over historical relativism, held in the University church, Lewis had walked out, leaving a very poor impression on the audience. He failed to stay to hear, let alone contest, Rowse’s argument that a modern man’s view of the universe was so different from, say, that obtaining in the first century ad that this must affect our reading of historical documents. If we no longer think that epileptics are people who are possessed by devils or that heaven is a place located directly above us in the clouds and penetrable by direct take-off from Galilean hillsides, this must change our reading of the Gospels. Lewis would have none of it, and went so far as to put this line of argument on Screwtape’s favourite list of intellectual fads, thereby assigning Rowse (at least by implication) to hell. Rowse, who is capable of taking great offence over smaller matters than this, always admires and recognizes greatness and genius in others; and he could see Lewis’s greatness and genius, though finding him personally uncongenial. Lewis was touched by Rowse’s kind review and came up to him in a train to thank him. As they sat down together in the compartment, Rowse said, ‘I did enjoy the book very much, and I think it was a good book. But now that I have got you in person, let me tell you some of the things which were wrong with it.’ He went on to say, as many others had said, that it was silly to disparage the growth of New Learning, and the arrival in England of the Latin and Greek classics. Had not Lewis himself enormously benefited from the work begun by More and Erasmus, Sir John Cheke and others? Lewis conceded the point.