C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  For much of the time, Warnie was left in ‘solitary splendour’6 while Jack went to Cambridge. In those days, there was a little cross-country train which made the journey possible. Jack was always civil if he met acquaintances on this train, but evidently a train, like a sitting room, was for him a place where a ‘man is at his books’, and the Professor did not wish to spend the journey in idle chatter.

  Being a professor fulfilled, as Warnie said, ‘the ideal we all have of less work and more pay … Also he has a Fellowship at Magdalene which he so much prefers to his old Magdalen Oxford that he now always calls the latter the Impenitent.’7 ‘Cambridge is fun,’ Jack agreed, ‘such a country town feeling.’8

  It was in a spirit of fun that he approached Cambridge: grateful that they had wanted him, and pleased that he had arrived in a place of such beauty. ‘It is not Cambridge, but Oxford which is the hardboiled materialistic scientific university. At Cambridge the majority of dons and undergraduates are Christians,’9 Warnie wrote, evidently on his brother’s say-so. If this was something of an exaggeration, it was nevertheless true that there were plenty of people who welcomed Lewis to Cambridge and who thoroughly enjoyed his lectures and companionship. One thinks not only of his colleagues at the Penitent Magdalene but also of such varied figures as Muriel Bradbrook, Graham Hough, and Joan Bennett in the English Faculty. There were others besides. He formed a very typical Lewisian friendship, shortly after his arrival, with a young research fellow of Girton and Newnham called Nan Dunbar, a clever, angular young Scotswoman who, even now, both in what she says and the way she says it, seems to have stepped straight out of the pages of the Waverley novels. She attended Lewis’s lectures and was arrested by something he said about the ‘Silver’ Latin poet Statius, whose ‘moderately interesting but often rather turgid’ epic Tbebais tells the story of Seven against Thebes. In Dante’s Purgatorio, Statius is counted as a sort of honorary or secret Christian, and Lewis claimed that the reason for this was that Statius ‘seemed to give his female virgin characters an attitude to the sexual life which Dante would not easily have found in any other ancient text’.10

  An inveterate letter-writer, and a bit of a flirt, Miss Dunbar wrote to the Professor to tell him that he was wrong. Maidens of the ancient world, claimed Miss Dunbar, were expected to behave themselves in the pre-Christian era just as much as in the Christian. One of Statius’s maidens blushed because she had seen her betrothed in a dream. Was it an erotic dream? Or was it less that sex was wicked in itself than that it made the gods jealous? For eleven days, letters flew backwards and forwards between the colleges of Professor Lewis and Miss Dunbar. ‘We know from Dante’, Lewis said, ‘that Statius got to heaven: if we ever get there we can ask him which he meant.’ That was no comfort to Miss Dunbar. As she wittily parried, Lewis was bound to get to heaven before she did, and then he would have probably argued poor old Statius into agreeing with him by the time she arrived. Thirty years after the correspondence, she concludes, ‘I have to admit that on the general point of Statius’s then unusual attitude to sex, I now think that Lewis was right and I was wrong. He had read the whole of Statius – I still haven’t and I doubt if I ever shall.’

  At the end of term, they met at a dinner. ‘Ah! Miss Dunbar! I’m glad to find you actually exist – I’d thought that perhaps you were only the personification of my conscience.’ They had a merry evening, she quoting the (to him unknown) enjoyably bad Scottish poet William McGonagall, and he introducing her to his Ulster equivalent – the novelist Amanda McKittrick Ros. The next day she received a Latin poem which he had written about her through the post: ‘Nan is more learned than all girls, more formidable than fierce Camilla, less able to control her tongue than Xanthippe. Bold, garrulous, obstinate, aggressive, grim, ferocious, companion of the sister Furies, daughter of Momus, mother of Zoilus, writing terrifying things, with a glance as sharp as watercress [this phrase is a quotation in Greek from Aristophanes, the playwright on whom Miss Dunbar is an expert]’ – and then finally the punch-line from Catullus – ‘A girl who does not allow you to be careless’.

  Nan est doctior omnibus puellis

  Formidabilior fera Camilla,

  Xanthippa magis impotens loquelae,

  Audax, garrula, pertinax, proterva,

  Trux, torva. Eumenidem comes sororum,

  Momi filia Zoilique mater.

  Scribens horrida, kapsaua Blenouca

  Per quam non licet esse negligentes.11

  History does not relate whether Mrs Gresham, like Statius’s maiden, blushed at her own dreams; but there could now be no doubt about the identity of the beloved revealed in them. Her divorce had been made final on 5 August 195412 The following August, 1955, she and the boys moved to Oxford – 10 Old High Street, Headington. It is a dingy house, and the Greshams occupied half of it. For ten years, Jack and Minto had traipsed about, living in various versions of just such lodgings. Seeing Joy move in must have brought back to Jack memories of his past. It was he who had found the place for them. It had considerably more room than the flat in Belsize Park, and the rent was proportionally much higher, but, as Joy’s biographer tells us, ‘this was no problem’ because ‘C. S. Lewis … paid the rent.’13

  By now Joy had confided in Bel Kaufman that she was ‘deeply in love with Jack’. Warnie saw that ‘it was now obvious what was going to happen.’14 Jack, interestingly enough, did not see, or anyway not fully. His autobiography shows his tremendous capacity (inherited, though he could not see it, from his father) for thinking he saw human situations extremely clearly, but actually getting them plumb wrong. Just as, in the examples I have already quoted, he genuinely supposed that the major relationships of his life, with his father and Minto, had no bearing on his religious development, a similar myopia now took possession of him in relation to Joy Gresham.

  He was now paying for the education of Joy’s children, and paying her rent. Bill Gresham, the alcoholic who had been rough with the children, and was now apparently incapable of paying cheques to his family on any regular basis, seemed like a repetition of the mythical Beast, alias Courtney Edward Moore. ‘If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind-hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill,’ Albert Lewis had written in 1919, ‘I should not be so uneasy.’15 It is even likely that in her abrasive line of talk, and the bold way in which she liked to argue with Jack, Joy reminded him of what had first attracted him to Mrs Moore. But he did not allow himself to see that the fates were preparing her as a Mrs Moore substitute.

  Those of his friends who, at this juncture, were aware of Mrs Gresham’s presence in Oxford still found her charm somewhat elusive. There was an occasion, for example, when George Sayer was lunching with Lewis in Oxford. Because Sayer had something to do in town that afternoon, he suggested that his wife Moira go to The Kilns and read a book until he called for her. They had often arranged things this way, just as Warnie and Jack were used to staying in Sayer’s house in Malvern. Jack excused himself, saying that he wanted a nap, and left Mrs Sayer sitting in the library. During his absence, Mrs Gresham walked into the house, whistling loudly. When she saw Mrs Sayer, she asked abruptly, ‘Who the hell are you and what the bloody hell are you doing in this house?’ She was carrying a pile of Jack’s laundry. Moira Sayer politely pointed out that she was a friend of Jack’s and had, in fact, met Mrs Gresham once before.16 ‘Her mind was quick and muscular as a leopard,’ Lewis wrote admiringly of his inamorata. ‘It scented the first whiff of cant or slush, then sprang.’17 Not everyone found this approach to conversation markedly congenial.

  Throughout the latter part of 1955 and the early months of 1956, Jack was relishing her company. ‘I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure of being exposed and laughed at.’ Rousseau’s taste, he had written in 1917, ‘is altogether for suffering rather than inflicting: which I can feel too’.18 Just as in the early stages of his involvement with Minto, Lewis positively revelled in a situation where others migh
t have regarded him as a victim who was being exploited. There is an emotional paradox here which his friends, very understandably, were slow to perceive. Knowing how important their friendship was to Lewis, and indeed how self-conscious he was in his celebrations of it, they found it doubly puzzling and wounding that he should have selected as his consort a woman whom they found so intensely unappealing. They did not realize that, for Lewis, this represented a large part of Joy’s charm. He needed a love which threatened to upset or even to destroy the very fabric of his life. His love for Minto challenged the two great facts of his situation in 1919: his family and his academic career. Now that he was on his own once more, secure in his career and settled in his friendships, it was as if he needed to take some step which would alienate and destroy the things and the people that made him happy.

  Early in 1956, the British Home Office refused Mrs Gresham a permit to remain in England. There was only one way she could quickly secure herself the right to stay, and that was by marrying a citizen of the United Kingdom. ‘Jack assured me that Joy would continue to occupy her own house as “Mrs. Gresham”,’ wrote Warnie, ‘and that the marriage was a pure formality designed to give Joy the right to go on living in England: and I saw the uselessness of disabusing him.’19 Useless it certainly would have been, but by now Lewis found himself in a position which not only was extraordinarily painful from an emotional point of view, but also struck at the very heart of his theological position. It was a genuine spiritual crisis.

  What scandalized some of Lewis’s Christian friends about his bluff eagerness to become an apologist for the faith in the late 1930s and early 1940s was their sense that he did not really understand enough about theology. On a much deeper and more personal level, as he had admitted to Sister Penelope when the bulk of his apologetic writings had been finished and published, he had not really believed in or understood the doctrine that God forgives human sin. Nearly all forms of religious belief except Orthodox Judaism and orthodox Christianity are in some measure dualistic: that is, they do not really believe that One God is responsible for everything in a cohesive, unified creation. The existence of pain and suffering – or, in many schemes of religious thought, the existence of matter itself – is explained by the existence of rival or lesser divinities who made the world of sin and change while, all unseen, the First Mover sits indifferently above. The doctrine, evolved by the Jews and developed most fully in Christianity, that God is One, and that He made and loved the world, is imaginatively extremely hard to hold on to. Lewis’s imagination had a naturally dualistic tendency, which was why he was so brilliant at dreaming up letters from the Devil. And we see no clearer example of his dualism than in his thinking about marriage. ‘My own view’, he had said in his broadcast talk, ‘is that the Church should frankly recognise that the majority of British people are not Christians and therefore cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.’20

  This is a wildly unhistorical, untheological and impractical suggestion. By what possible criterion could ‘a man’ – or, come to that, a woman – distinguish between such ‘marriages’? For most of the history of the Church, marriages did not happen within the church building. They were civil contracts sealed at the church door. One thinks of the Wife of Bath with her ‘housbondes at chirche doore I hadde five’. Even when marriage was raised to the dignity of a sacrament by the medieval western church (largely to make up the number of the sacraments to the magical seven), it was never suggested that the church, or the priest, made the marriage. The ministers of this particular ‘sacrament’ are the man and the woman who perform it; and in this sense any marriage, in Catholic teaching, is a marriage. A marriage between a pair of Hindus or a pair of modern secular agnostics is still, in orthodox Christian thinking, a marriage. By Lewis’s argument, agnostic married couples who subsequently became Christians would presumably have to get ‘remarried’ in a church. This suggests a profound split in his dunking, not only about the relationship between flesh and spirit, but also about the relationship between Christianity and what he called the Tao. Tolkien, in a lengthy and excellently argued critique of Lewis’s ‘Christian Marriage’ idea, goes to the heart of the matter when he pounces on Lewis’s analogy ‘I should be very angry if the Mahommedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine.’ So, Lewis concludes by extension, Christians should not make it difficult for non-Christians to divorce. This is, as Tolkien says, ‘a most stinking red herring’:

  No item of compulsory Christian morals is valid only for Christians … Toleration of divorce – if a Christian does tolerate it – is toleration of a human abuse … And wrong behaviour (if it is really wrong on universal principles) is progressive, always: it never stops at being ‘not very good’, ‘second best’ – it either reforms, or goes on to third-rate, bad, abominable.21

  On the question of divorce, when he was considering it on a purely cerebral level, Lewis had failed to face up to the dilemma. Either Christ, in condemning it (as the Gospels say He did), was uttering a universal moral law, binding for everybody – in which case a Christian cannot believe in ‘divorce for non-Christians’ any more than he can believe in theft for non-Christians – or it is not a universal law that divorce is in all circumstances wrong. This is the view that, over the years, various Christian denominations have worked towards, including the Greek Orthodox and the Presbyterian Churches. They have extracted from the New Testament the texts which do allow for divorce in some circumstances, and in this sense they have come clean. The wholeness of their vision – like the wholeness and consistency of Tolkien’s absolute no-divorce belief-is left intact.

  Not so for Lewis, with his two-tier view of marriage. He, in any case, belonged to a church which, in spite of being famed for its wishy-washy Laodicean approach to the faith, has historically some of the strictest marriage laws of any denomination in Christendom. As I write these words in the late 1980s, things have loosened up. In the United States, there are even divorced and remarried bishops of the Anglican Church. In England, there are many priests in such a position, and divorced men and women remarry and approach the altar to receive the sacraments, even though the exact state of Anglican canon law about their status and the lawfulness of remarrying such persons in church remains, in some minds or some dioceses, somewhat hazy. In 1956, this was not the case. The most famous ‘royal’ story of the 1950s raised the question of whether Princess Margaret, the sister of Queen Elizabeth II, could marry the man she loved, Group Captain Townsend. He was divorced, and it was this alone that made her forsake him, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching’.

  Lewis must have discussed the matter with his friend Austin Farrer, whose views would, roughly speaking, have coincided with those of Tolkien. Farrer, in all his moral thinking, was purely ‘tridentine’ and would have no truck either with the idea of two-tier marriages or with the legality of Christian divorce. But both as a friend and as a priest, he crossed St Giles, the large avenue running north out of Oxford, from his flat in Trinity College to the register office which in those days nestled between the Quaker meeting house and the Army Recruitment Centre. It was St George’s Day and Shakespeare’s birthday. By what turned out to be a hideous prophetic instinct, the two friends Lewis asked to witness the ceremony were Farrer and his doctor, Havard.

  Lewis was by now in a tremendous muddle. At some stage he had been to see Havard – and how typical this was of the man – to ask whether he would be well advised to undertake conjugal duties. After due examination and consideration, Havard decided that his patient, though at fifty-eight a little heavy and rather prone to high blood pressure, could risk the excitements of an erotic life if he took things gently. But with another part of himself, Lewis was reassuring Warnie that the marriage was simply a matter of convenience, to get Joy a
permit to stay in England. ‘There were never two people alive in the history of the world’, Douglas Gresham has said about his mother and stepfather, ‘more in love than Jack and Joy.’22 What was Lewis to do? His belief in the status of these second-tier marriages by the State was now put to the test. Were he and Joy married in the eyes of God or were they not? If God had joined them together, then there was no reason why they should be put asunder, and his enquiries in Havard’s consulting room could cease to be of purely academic concern. But there was a lingering doubt. Though he continued to see her every day, and though Joy confided in her brother that Jack was a wonderful lover, the fiction was maintained that she was Mrs Gresham, and he was merely an ami de la maison calling each afternoon or evening, and often not getting home until after eleven o’clock. Only a very few of his friends, like the Farrers, were even let into the secret that he was married; this reticence caused bewilderment and resentment among old friends like Tolkien and Dyson when – as inevitably happened – the news leaked out.

  What on earth did Jack think he was playing at? His behaviour during that summer was exuberant and strange. ‘The most precious gift that marriage gave me’, he wrote when it was all over, ‘was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real.’ This sense of reality, which involved not only a sense of self-discovery, but also a readjustment of what he thought about God and hence about everything else, was something which had been developing through all the previous year, and is reflected in the novel he wrote now and dedicated to Joy: Till We Have Faces. With a large part of himself Lewis did not want things to go any further. For the first time in his life, he was enjoying a unique combination of pleasures. He was happy in his academic work, and enjoying the company of his colleagues. At home, all was peace. In September he had a very happy holiday on his own in Ireland. He told Greeves about Joy, and about the civil marriage, but more of what he said we cannot know. He did not take Joy’s aches and pains, reported at intervals over the summer, any more seriously than he took his own. When the Useless Quack was consulted, he gave it as his opinion that she was suffering from fibrositis.