C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  ‘Now, as for the prose writers of the period,’ said Rowse, ‘I cannot agree with all that you write. You praise Cardinal Allen, who is really negligible and wrote very little, but you do not even mention Robert Parsons, the Jesuit who wrote over thirty books and was one of the most considerable prose writers of the Elizabethan period. Why?’ If the question had been put to a candidate at a viva voce examination it would have bowled him full stump. Rowse could tell from his companion’s face that Lewis realized, in that moment, that he had simply missed Parsons out by an oversight – probably because he had not read him. But the police-court lawyer suddenly appeared in the carriage – the same man who had told Helen Gardner on a reflex that all his pupils read Calvin. ‘I did not think he was sufficiently important to be included,’ said Lewis. But it was a bluster, and both men knew it, and they passed the rest of the journey in silence.15

  In spite of its lacunae and eccentricities, the OHEL volume established Lewis beyond question as a giant among the pygmies of the Oxford English Faculty, which made their failure to promote him to a professorship all the more surprising.*

  It was to be another university – Cambridge – which recognized his merits and rewarded them. In the summer of 1954, Cambridge established a new Chair of English specializing in the literature of the medieval and Renaissance periods. It was fairly obvious who should fill this chair, but Cambridge took soundings. A letter was written, for instance, to Helen Gardner, recently appointed Reader in Renaissance Literature at Oxford, to ask whether she knew of anyone suitable for the post. She interpreted this letter as a darkly worded offer of the job to herself, and replied that, while being flattered by the enquiry, she thought that the obvious man for the job was Lewis. She communicated this information, not without some self-importance, to Tolkien. As a matter of fact she spoke of all academic appointments, in her own or other universities, as if they were in her gift, and ‘I got Lewis the Cambridge chair’ was one of her favourite songs. It was at least true that Helen Gardner, with all her distaste for Lewis as an individual, recognized his greatness and had a genuine respect for his written work. (Her characteristically dreary view remained unshakeable, though, that he would never have been suitable for an Oxford chair because he would not do any ‘work’, by which she meant supervising graduate students. In fact he did supervise some graduates, but lacked her voracious appetite for rewriting every thesis in sight.)

  After all the due approaches had been made, Lewis accepted, with very mixed feelings, the chair and a fellowship at Magdalene College, Cambridge. It was a great honour, but the University was one that he only knew very slightly. Although he would keep on The Kilns and continue to reside there during the vacations and weekends, Oxford, as a university, would no longer be home. It was a big severance; a sort of exile. And though it would be an exaggeration to compare Lewis’s promotion with the effective banishment from Oxford of Shelley and Newman (who in their different ways offended the prevailing orthodoxy of their times), it could be said that Lewis was exiled, in some sense, for his refusal to toe the line. It was not his failure to be a good graduate supervisor which cost him an Oxford chair, it was Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters: the fact that he wrote them, and the far more damaging fact that millions of people, as they do to this day, wanted to read them.

  His inaugural lecture at Cambridge was arranged to take place on Monday, 29 November 1954, just before he finally relinquished his post at Oxford. It was indicative of the way that he was developing at this time that he chose to give the lecture not about Chaucer or Ariosto or Spenser, but about himself. His thesis was a sort of rambling elaboration of ‘the old order changeth, yielding place to new’. He could not hope to rival other scholars, but he could place himself before the University of Cambridge as a dinosaur, as a specimen representing a vanished age, an obsolete set of beliefs, a wholly outmoded way of looking at the world. There was a strong element of irony in all this. But one of the things which makes Lewis such an interesting character is that – like some of the great Romantic poets – he was an object not just of fascination but also of mystery to himself. The ‘dinosaur’ he presented to his Cambridge audience was one of self-image. No one who knows anything of Lewis can suppose that it was an altogether false image. But nor was he altogether aware that, having painted the picture of the dinosaur, he had in some senses already done it to death. He was, at the age of fifty-six, in the process of turning into something very different. This was not a case of a poseur dropping one ‘act’ and wondering whether to try another. It was much more organic and natural than that. One hesitates to speak of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, for that would be to imply (falsely) that the former selves of Lewis were only preparations for the latter selves. But the emergence of other selves was something over which he had very little control, and which he watched with bewilderment and fascination.

  The friends who organized a dinner of farewell from the Oxford English Faculty on 9 December 1954 had little or no conception of what had been going on inside Lewis. The dinner was held at Merton. F. P. Wilson came, and Nevill Coghill, J. R. R. and Christopher Tolkien, Hugo Dyson and a number of others, including, as Warnie noted, ‘an unfortunate young man with a face like a fish, who never, so far as I saw, made a remark all evening’.16

  The young fish-face did not strike Warnie as interesting, but he provides us with an important clue about the way Lewis conducted his life. He was understandably shy on that occasion, because he had just been appointed Lewis’s successor at Magdalen, and the thought of following in such footsteps was more than a little awe-inspiring. Many academics in Lewis’s position would have made a great song and dance about finding a successor, suggested looking about a very wide field (the conceited implication being that they themselves were virtually irreplaceable) and generally wasted time. Lewis loathed time-wasting and lived his life on the ‘Lord will provide’ principle. The young man was very young indeed, but Lewis, who had taught him for three years, knew him to be very clever, and he was aware that Magdalen could travel further and fare worse in its search for a replacement. The young man also had the advantage – though he shared much of Lewis’s wide-ranging fondness for reading of all kinds – of being quite unlike his master. Where one was red, the other was white; where one was loud, the other was quiet; where one was fat, the other was thin. Emrys Jones went on to be a much-loved English tutor at Magdalen, where he remained until his appointment to the Goldsmiths’ Chair of English Literature some thirty or more years later.

  ‘I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought to me about eleven, so much the better,’17 Lewis wrote in his autobiography. The passivity of this attitude was something he carried with him through life, and it explains both how he managed to achieve so much, to read and write so much, and at the same time why his outward surroundings, his household, family and friends, have struck so many people as bizarre. Most people, in the quest for colleagues or companions for life, imagine themselves to be making a great search. But in Lewis’s case, why Paddy Moore? Because he just happened to be sharing Lewis’s rooms at Keble for a few weeks in the summer of 1917. From the simple fact that Moore was there flowed all the subsequent events of Lewis’s life until 1951. Why the ‘unfortunate young man with a face like a fish’ when there must have been a dozen men, at that date, whom most selection boards would have guessed to be more exciting? Because he was there. Now Lewis, in his new frame of mind, was reaching a point where it was extremely likely that he would think about getting married. It mattered extremely, in this case, who happened to be there. She was in the audience at Cambridge when he gave his inaugural lecture. Unbeknown to any of the Oxford friends who drank Jack’s health at Merton at the beginning of December she was coming to spend Christmas at The Kilns, and this time she was bringing the boys.

  –SEVENTEEN–

  SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN

  19
54–1957

  Joy had finally left the United States in April 1953, bringing with her the two boys Douglas and David, then aged eight and nine. By the autumn of 1953, Renée had made her divorce from her former husband final, and was ready to marry Bill Gresham. Very short of funds, and of friends, Joy put up at a hotel in Belsize Park (the Avoca House Hotel) under the impression that north-west London was a useful place for a ‘writer’ to be. She had made various unsuccessful efforts to get stories and poems published, but she had found a publisher in New York for her Smoke on the Mountain: An Interpretation of the Ten Commandments. This was published in the States in November 1954, with a dedication to C. S. Lewis. A few months later, Hodder & Stoughton published it in London, largely because it had a preface by Lewis praising it in the most extravagant terms. This should not be interpreted as having any special significance, incidentally, since when Lewis liked a book, particularly one written by a friend, he tended to lard on the praise, without realizing that this made people ‘smell a rat’. His research pupil in Oxford, for example, Katherine Ing, wrote a very worthy little book on The Elizabethan Lyric. She eventually became a Fellow of St Hilda’s; but she missed several jobs because the electors could not believe that she was as good as Lewis’s references said she was. He praised her Elizabethan Lyric so fulsomely that the cynical dons assumed, since she was a beautiful young woman, that Lewis had a ‘soft spot’ for her. Nothing could have been further from the truth. It would be like arguing that he had a homosexual crush on Barfield, whose books, if you believed Lewis’s accounts of them, would put Coleridge in the shade.

  Relations with Joy, however, were deepening. She was quick to latch on to another of Lewis’s characteristics, extreme generosity with money, and, having put the boys into an expensive preparatory school which she could not possibly afford, she accepted Lewis’s offer to pay the fees. She was still based in London, moving out of the hotel into a nearby basement flat after only a few months. Lewis saw her on and off throughout the year, and even consented to entertain her parents, who came over in October 1954. ‘Poor lamb,’ Joy recorded, ‘there were moments, as when my father lectured him on the blessings of Prohibition, when I saw his smile grow slightly fixed.’ As for her mother Jen, decked out ‘in a fancy black suit with rhinestone buttons, a pearl bracelet, a pearl choker, dingle-dangle pearl earrings, a pink lace blouse and a shocking pink hat … I’ll let you imagine Jack’s reaction for yourself,’ Joy wrote.1 This was of course meant to be gently mocking of her parents. But in fact Jack rather liked them. He who had reacted to the first sight of England at the age of nine with ‘immediate hatred’ was more than ready to befriend and adopt these jolly people, the Davidmans, who came as strangers.

  Joy was a vivacious and physically attractive woman, then only thirty-nine years of age. On her visits to Oxford, there had been walks with Jack hand in hand which produced in her feelings of ‘the most wonderful ecstasy’. In December 1953, she and the boys had spent four days of the Christmas holidays at The Kilns. ‘It went swimmingly, ’ Lewis said, ‘though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing.’ For the children, it was a strange experience. Douglas, aged eight, felt that he was entering a world of magic. In the hall, he saw the large lumpish wardrobe which now stands in the Marion E. Wade collection at Wheaton College, Illinois. Was it … the wardrobe? ‘It might be!’ Lewis replied. It was years before Douglas dared open its door.2 But if the wardrobe might be magic, the magician himself was a little bit of a let-down. ‘Heroes are supposed to be dressed in a knight’s armour,’ he said, ‘but this man looked so ordinary.’3 It was to be some years before he saw that this was just the point. The ordinariness was not entirely accidental. ‘I am tall, fat, bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired and wear glasses for reading,’ Lewis had written not long before to a class of fifth-graders in Rockville, Maryland. They had asked him for a description of himself. ‘Best love to you all. When you say your prayers, sometimes ask God to bless me.’4 It was a juvenile version of his Cambridge inaugural lecture.

  ‘Look at me!’ his childhood reflections, even those written before the death of his natural mother, appear to be saying. In the years immediately following his election at Cambridge, the self-disclosure in what he wrote became still more marked, and more relaxed; and at the same time he had found a woman with whom he felt able to be completely open about himself. We do not know whether, in his early years with Minto, he disclosed much of himself. Certainly when six years before her actual death she thought she was dying, she went to the kitchen in The Kilns, and shovelled all Jack’s early letters to her into the stove. When he first knew her, even when he was going to visit her in the afternoons, he had written to her every day. There was a lot to destroy, and no doubt there was a lot which she did not wish Maureen or Warnie to read. Whatever there had been between herself and Jack, it was private. The openness which was a feature of his relationship with Joy perhaps excelled what he had had in the early days of Minto and had been missing for so long.5

  So, naturally, these were the years of autobiography, the years when he took stock of himself, and genuinely began to wonder who and what he was.

  Surprised by Joy was a book which he had been toying with for years. It began as a verse autobiography, like Wordsworth’s Prelude or Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells, only unlike them it was not in blank verse but in rhyming couplets. The passage about Kirkpatrick reads:

  Across my landscape like the dawn

  Some image of the sovranty of truth was drawn,

  And how to have believed an unproved thing by will

  Pollutes the mind’s virginity; how reasons kill

  Beloved supposals: day makes lesser lights

  And mountain air is med’cinal. Oh, Attic nights

  And rigour of debate! Shrewd blows. Parry and thrust

  No quarter. And above us like the battle dust

  Fine particles of poets and philosophers

  Went flying in the midnight room. I had my spurs

  Of intellectual knighthood in that bannered field

  From Kirk’s strong hand …

  When he found himself rhyming ‘spurs’ with ‘philosophers’ it was probably as well to switch to prose. I have in the course of this book already commented in detail on many points in Surprised by Joy. Perhaps like most autobiographies, its evasions and omissions are as eloquent as anything which Lewis chose to put in: the dismissal of his love for Minto in a single phrase (‘My earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged’), the preposterous assertion that ‘my father’s death … does not really come into the story I am telling,’ the paradox that he represents his conversion to Christianity as a cerebral and intellectual affair, without recounting the famous conversation with Dyson and Tolkien during the midnight hours in Addison’s Walk. About the Lewis who actually lived and moved and had his being, it tells us almost nothing – still less about the religious believer who emerges in his letters – say, those to Sister Penelope. It is really a glorious sort of comic novel. Although there is a strong element of malice in the comic portrait of his father, one could wish it twenty times longer, because it is surely born out of the sense that, insufferably annoying as he may have been in life, there was also something glorious about him. Lewis was able to love his father as a literary character in a way he could never love him as a man. The chapter called ‘Release’ is one of the funniest things written in English in the twentieth century.

  But in a sense, even as he was writing it, and impishly choosing its title, which by then was charged for him with double meaning, Lewis was becoming aware that it is not so easy to tell the truth about ourselves. And it was out of this dilemma that his novel Till We Have Faces would grow.

  Perhaps the autobiographical preoccupations were exacerbated by an increase in solitude, combined with the sense, dramatically presented in his inaugural lecture, that he was now, to so many people, a new face, a man they did not know, someone who nee
ded explaining. Life at The Kilns continued. A new kitten called Ginger came to replace the one who had died at the end of the previous year. And Jill Freud gave the Lewises a poodle bitch puppy whose charms excited all the dogs in the neighbourhood. ‘One’, Jack told her, ‘gave a barking serenade at about 3 a.m. this morning. Another barked at me in our own drive. I am sick of (canine) love.’ Warnie, who had Jack and the house to himself, was blossoming out as an author in his own right. In 1953 he had published a really excellent book about life in France during the reign of Louis XIV called The Splendid Century. He was at work on another – Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine, 1670-1736. Well researched and pleasantly written, they were much more than a mere therapy to keep their author from alcoholic temptation. It is astonishing that the author of these books, who writes in such a way as to make the Versailles of Saint-Simon come completely alive, should never himself have visited Versailles – a mere seven or eight hours’ journey from The Kilns. He always said that actually visiting the place about which he had so many pleasant daydreams would spoil it.