C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  In the late 1950s, after Lewis wrote his book on the Psalms, he was invited to sit on a church committee advising about the revision of the Psalter. Lewis hosted this committee on a number of occasions at Magdalene, Cambridge, and he and Eliot dined together sometimes with their wives. Both liturgically conservative, they would have been unlikely to have derived much pleasure from the knowledge of how radical liturgical change in their church was destined to be.

  Their differences could be demonstrated by comparing Eliot’s extremely judgemental and ‘authoritative’ literary criticism with Lewis’s totally different approach. As he crept back to life again after the experience of bereavement, Lewis found himself contemplating the ‘subject’ and the Faculty of English to which he was returning. An Experiment in Criticism may seem to some readers (and in particular to those who have never had anything to do with the study of English in universities) to be an exercise in stating the obvious. It has to be understood as a document of its time before its merits, which are abundant, begin to emerge. Lewis went to Cambridge at a time when ‘evaluative’ criticism was at its height in the English school. For adherents of this approach to the subject, ‘reading English’ meant being encouraged as a young person of twenty or twenty-one to decide whether Chaucer, Milton or Dickens were ‘any good’. Lewis had moved away from a university where boring undergraduates wrote essays beginning ‘Swift was born … ’ He had entered a university where anything so prosaic as a fact would have marred the moral attitudinizing of those who looked to I. A. Richards and F. R. Leavis as to the leaders of some new way of study. In this atmosphere, whole categories of book, and the works of authors hitherto considered great (like Dickens or Milton), were dismissed as valueless. This was particularly true in the case of Dr Leavis, who had some of the fanaticism of a Savonarola or a Robespierre. Lewis tactfully and cunningly does not mention Leavis by name but there can be no doubt who is meant when he describes the new Vigilant critics:

  We have learned from the political sphere that committees of public-safety, witch-hunters, Ku Klux Klans, Orangemen, Macarthyites et hoc genus omne can become dangers as great as those they were formed to combat. The use of the guillotine becomes an addiction. Thus under Vigilant criticism a new head falls nearly every month. The list of approved authors grows absurdly small. No one is safe.8

  What had begun as an apparently sensible desire to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ literature had ended with a vast Index of proscribed books, including the names of all but a tiny handful of writers approved by Dr Leavis – D. H. Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, and two or three more. Strange to say, far from repelling the young, this ungenerous approach to a vast literary tradition stretching back a thousand years attracted zealous adherents. Lewis had left the university which supported King Charles I in the Civil War and gone to the University of Oliver Cromwell. ‘The Literary Puritans’, Lewis realized,

  are too serious as men to be seriously receptive as readers. I have listened to an undergraduate’s paper on Jane Austen from which, if I had not read them, I should never have discovered that there was the least hint of comedy in her novels. After a lecture of my own I have been accompanied from Mill Lane to Magdalene by a young man protesting with real anguish and horror against my wounding, my vulgar, my irreverent suggestion that The Miller’s Tale was written to make people laugh … We are breeding up a race of young people who are as solemn as the brutes (‘smiles from reason flow’); as solemn as a nineteen year old Scottish son of the manse at an English sherry party who takes all the compliments for declarations and all the banter for insult.9

  It was in this atmosphere that Lewis was writing, and the Experiment was not to replace one sort of literary evaluation with another but to abandon evaluative literary criticism altogether.

  Can I honestly and strictly speaking, say with any confidence that my appreciation of any scene, chapter, stanza or line has been improved by my reading of Aristotle, Dryden, Johnson, Lessing, Coleridge, Arnold himself (as a practising critic), Pater or Bradley? I am not sure that I can … It is always better to read Chaucer again than to read a new criticism of him.10

  This seems like common sense today, but in the Cambridge of 1960 it was explosive stuff. Lewis proposed that instead of dividing books and authors into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ on the say-so of critics, we should judge literature by the way we read it. The duty of reading, as well as its pleasure, was, he believed, in submission to what the author actually intended. ‘We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves.’ Books which compel us to re-read them frequently, to be attentive to their exact wording and style, books which cannot be read as non-literary people read trash, will always emerge and remain as the great books. The advantage of Lewis’s approach is that it need not give way either to snobbery (pretending we like books which happen to be fashionable) or to inverted snobbery (in the way that Lewis’s temptation was to see more merit in Captain Marryat than in T. S. Eliot). It does not really matter what judgement we pass on a book. What matters is not what we do to the book but what the book does to us. The Experiment ends with one of the finest paragraphs in the whole Lewis œuvre:

  Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like a night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.11

  When it appeared posthumously, J. R. R. Tolkien was repelled by Letters to Malcolm, finding in it precisely the attitude which Lewis professed to find distasteful in his grandparents – ‘Cosily at ease in Zion’. Among a lot of criticisms which seem wide of the mark, Tolkien managed to score some very palpable hits, most notably when he said that the Letters were not ‘about prayer’ but ‘about Lewis praying’. In the same way it could be said that An Experiment in Criticism is not about literature but about Lewis Reading, and A Grief Observed is candidly, though anonymously, what its title says it is. Doubtless if Letters to Malcolm were being offered to us as a manual of prayer, a substitute for St François de Sales or William Law, Tolkien’s objection would be only proper. But a taste for Lewis is, in large part, a taste for reading about him. Though it was denied him to become a great poet, he shares with ‘the last Romantics’ a vivid awareness of his own consciousness, a sense that the chief end of writing is to communicate sensation and experience. A high proportion of Lewis’s œvre when properly considered can be found to be of the same kind as Wordsworth’s Prelude, a book which was always very dear to him. What the Catholic Tolkien found distasteful – in particular the inference drawn from Malcolm that an ‘unqualified’ Protestant layman might take upon himself a teaching office in a matter so delicate as how we should pray – was precisely what Lewis would have felt justified his position as a writer. He disclaimed the role of directeur, which was why he framed his book in the form of fictitious letters to the invented figure of Malcolm, who has apparently (his letters are not attempted) been hitting back, Barfield-style, at the chinks in Lewis’s armour. At the same time, he was not frightened of soliloquy, either as a literary mode or as a means of discovering or conveying religious truth, as he made plain by quoting one of his own poems, pretending that the identity of the author was unknown to him:

  They tell me, Lord, that when I seem To be in speech with you,

  Since but one voice is heard, it’s all a dream, One talker aping two.

  Sometimes it is, yet not as they Conceive it. Rather, I

  Seek in myself the things I hoped to say, But lo! my wells are dry.

  Then, seeing me empty, you forsake The listener’s role and through

  My dumb lips breathe and into utterance wake The thoughts I never knew.

&nb
sp; And thus you neither need reply Nor can; thus, while we seem

  Two talkers, thou art one forever, and I No dreamer, but thy dream.

  ‘Dream’, adds Lewis the critic, ‘makes it too like Pantheism and was perhaps dragged in for the rhyme. But is he not right in thinking that prayer in its most perfect state is a soliloquy? If the Holy Spirit speaks in the man, then in prayer God speaks to God. But the human petitioner does not therefore become a “dream”.’

  Maybe not a dream. But there remains a sense in which all Romantic writers (Romantic in the sense of post-Wordsworthians who make themselves and their own sensations the subject of their work) are difficult to pin down. There are those who, discerning that Lewis, like Yeats, worked by assuming a number of masks, have come to the conclusion that there was something bogus about him; that either in his literary attitudes, or his bluff conservatism, or his religious faith, he was ‘putting it on’. This misjudgement of Lewis surely stems from a mistaken view of how anything comes to be written, or possibly even perceived. Just as, all those years ago, Tolkien and Dyson drew Lewis into Christianity by making him see that it was truth told by means of story, so he himself as a writer is so constantly accessible and interesting because he is unashamed of the story-telling element in all literary modes. It is not a lie to recognize that literature itself is unnatural. So, having tried to write a straight book on prayer and found in the early 1950s that he had to abandon it, in Malcolm he found the perfect mode. It was almost certainly suggested by reading Rose Macaulay’s ‘real’ Letters to a Friend, a correspondence with her former confessor and largely taken up with spiritual matters. But the fact that the mode is only a mode does not mean that the content of Malcolm is bogus, any more than the semi-fictionalized pattern of A Grief Observed should make us suppose that he did not really go through the experience of bereavement.

  A failure to understand the kind of writer Lewis was – a Romantic egoist in the tradition of Wordsworth and Yeats – has led to two of the grosser extremes among those expressing views about him since his death. (And similar extremes are noticeable among those who love or loathe Wordsworth and Yeats.) On the one hand there are those who would dismiss all three writers as mere poseurs, shallow men pretending to be deep, mortals putting on immortal masks. This view must be false – in Lewis’s case – because every single piece of biographical evidence which exists supports the opposite point of view. In love, in friendship and above all in religion there can be no doubt of his passionate sincerity.

  On the other hand there are those readers who are so uplifted by the sublimity of Lewis at his best as a writer that they assume that he was himself a sublime being, devoid of blemishes. Readers of this kind either ignore Lewis’s faults altogether, and attribute any mention of them to some ulterior motive (possibly anti-religious) on behalf of the speaker, or – oddest of all to neutral observers who perhaps haven’t read much Lewis or made up their minds about him – they acknowledge the faults but wish to make them into virtues. We suddenly find ourselves in an uncongenial world where a bullying, hectoring technique in public debate is held up as a courageous defence of the faith, or spells of club-room misogyny are taken as evidence of holy celibacy.

  All this seems a pity because it dehumanizes a man who was not posing when he described his wife and himself as ‘a sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God’s patients, not yet cured’.12 If we ignore the kind of man Lewis was, in our anxiety to dismiss him as a fraud or canonize him as a plaster saint, we miss the unmistakable and remarkable evidence of something like sanctification which occurred in him towards the end of his days. The suffering which smashed him up and made him so vulnerable did not destroy his faith. Nor did it destroy the kind of man he was. He went on being a red-faced Ulsterman, he continued to smoke and drink heavily, his aesthetic tastes remained much the same – that is to say broad. He never did see the point in Arthur Greeves’s fondness for Proust; but nor could you ever classify Lewis as a man who ‘only liked’ fantasy, or epic poems, or E. Nesbit, much as he liked all three. A fortnight before his death, he was reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses and writing to a colleague at Magdalene, Cambridge – ‘Wow what a book! Come to lunch on Friday (fish) and tell me about it.’13

  This colleague, Richard William Ladborough, went to lunch ‘and of course it was Jack who told me about it; and not the other way round … I somehow felt it was the last time we should meet, and when he escorted me, with his usual courtesy, to the door, I think he felt so too. Never was a man better prepared.’ One might take this as a commonplace, but it is not. Like many (most?) religious people, Lewis was profoundly afraid of death. His dread of it, when in the midst of life, had been almost pathological and obsessive. Physical extinction was a perpetual nightmare to him and, whatever his theological convictions and hopes, he was unable, before his wife’s death, to reconcile himself to the transition which death must inevitably entail.

  Towards the end, this changed. It was not that he developed a death wish: his hold on life was as vigorous as ever. But he became altogether more accepting of the cards that were being dealt to him. The last years at Cambridge were happy ones. His last year of all was dogged by humiliating illnesses which he took in a remarkably passive frame of mind. Since 1961, he had been troubled with an enlarged prostate gland, and from spring 1962 he was forced to wear a catheter.

  In spite of the fact that Havard had diagnosed Joy’s cancer as a touch of fibrositis, Lewis was still loyally employing the services of the Useless Quack when he was in Oxford. The catheter fitted by Havard was an almost Heath Robinson contraption, with a small tap at the end of Lewis’s penis to enable him to release the contents of his bladder as the need arose. He sometimes forgot, and there was more than one occasion, such as at a sherry party at Cambridge, when the thing burst and he wet his trousers, displaying no more than a jocular embarrassment at the incident.

  The Useless Quack’s attentions to his urinary problems brought more problems of their own, and by the early summer of 1962 Lewis was in very acute pain. His doctor in Cambridge was a young general practitioner called Tony Haines, who was astonished when he examined Lewis by the extent to which his case had been neglected. He had assumed that so famous and distinguished a professor would have been given the best possible medical attention; it was the sort of assumption young men make. Here, suspended from Lewis’s person, were pieces of tubing held on by rubber bands, an old wooden peg, a bit of cork. It was all filthy and stinking and, far worse, it was poisoning his system. It was killing him. He was put on to a low-protein diet, which he loathed; for his own eating tastes had come to resemble exactly those of his father, and he did not consider that he had eaten a ‘proper’ meal unless it included slices of meat off the joint. The Haineses had him to dinner in Cambridge and gave him a pizza. Pamela Haines, the doctor’s wife, and herself a writer, was so nervous that she burnt the pizza, so they did not have much to eat that evening.14 But neither Haines nor the other doctors could do much to help their patient, being afraid that the prostate operation which he so desperately needed would damage his weak heart. The heart trouble sometimes left him ‘gasping like a new-caught fish which no one has the kindness to knock on the head’.15

  In the same year J. R. R. Tolkien’s publishers wrote to Lewis asking him if he would be prepared to write a ‘puff for The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, a book of verse. It is indicative of how far the estrangement had gone that Lewis did not know Tolkien’s Oxford address; he wrote to Merton College and marked the envelope ‘Please forward’.

  Dear Tollers,

  Breckman has sent me a copy of The A. of T.B. and I have explained to him why I think the ‘word’ from me which he asked for wd. probably do the book no good and might do it harm. The public – little dreaming how much you dislike my work, bless you! – regard us as a sort of firm and wd. only laugh at what wd. seem to them mutual back-scratching.

  Lewis went on to praise the poems and suggest one emendation in the voice of ‘Bentley’,
one of the fictitious editors of The Lay of Leithien, whom he had invented as far back as 1937. It was an allusion to the time when his friendship with Tolkien was perhaps the most important ingredient in both their lives. He concluded the letter, ‘I wish we cd. ever meet.’16

  Prompted by this letter and at last yielding to his son’s persuasions, Tolkien agreed to meet Lewis. He and Christopher presented themselves at The Kilns some time later, deep in the winter of 1962-3. It was an awkward meeting, like an encounter between estranged members of a family. Neither Tolkien nor Lewis had much to say to one another. The icy winter weather as the two Tolkiens made their way back through the gloomy housing estates which now pressed in on The Kilns seemed to match the great chill which had descended on a once-warm friendship.17

  Lewis was unwell for most of the winter, but with the coming of spring hope revived, and he and Douglas Gresham planned a trip to Ireland to see Arthur Greeves. (‘I can manage stairs now provided I take them in bottom gear.’)18 But it was not to be. On 15 June 1963, Lewis had a heart attack and was taken into the Acland Nursing Home.

  Warnie was away in Ireland at the time, and when the seriousness of Jack’s condition became clear to him, he could not face it. For some weeks, no one was able to trace him, and by the time he turned up at the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda, it was obvious how he had been spending his time. Jack, meanwhile, was losing his hold on life. He became unconscious. A curate from a church near the Acland came and administered extreme unction (the anointing of the sick with oil) and, as quite often happens when this sacrament is administered, the patient recovered. Lewis sat up in bed and asked for tea, the beverage which he had consumed in enormous quantities over the years and which presumably accounted in part for the ruinous state of his bladder. But although he was awake, he was not ‘himself. Dressed in a sports coat and pyjama trousers, he began to give instructions to his nurses that he must be taken to the Bodleian Library. He also dictated some letters which, while being perfectly coherent, had no basis in fact. When he recovered, he remarked that his last real dread – that of madness – had been removed from him; having been mad, he saw that there was nothing to fear. The generalization was typical of his way of arguing; the identification of this post-comatose period of confusion with all the other horrors the mind is capable of suffering – schizophrenia, claustrophobia, simple depression – shows that in this way he was still the same. But in other ways he was different. To Sister Penelope, he wrote, ‘Ought one to honour Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard. When you die, and if “prison visiting” is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory. It is all rather fun – solemn fun – isn’t it?’19