It is at this point in Lewis’s life that his biographers find themselves in difficulties. When about to describe his return to Oxford in January 1919, Lewis says in Surprised by Joy: ‘But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged. But even if I were free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of this book.’31 In a more civilized age this would be accepted as an absolute embargo on prying further into private affairs. But as so many of Lewis’s most personal letters and papers have been published or are available in public collections, we have no choice but to follow up all the available evidence as far as it will take us.
It does not, in fact, take us very far. Early ‘hostility to the emotions’, aggravated by his (perhaps exaggerated) revulsion against the unsavoury perversions at Malvern, made Lewis excessively wary of ‘the lusts of the flesh’. While he discussed these matters freely with Arthur Greeves, and after his conversion spoke of his early sins with understandable detestation (we may add, with perhaps some exaggeration hovering between a touch of subconscious pride at his regeneration and a very real gratitude to God for helping him to achieve it), the available material gives absolutely no concrete evidence of lapses from chastity in the stricter sense.
Undoubtedly Lewis ‘fell in love’ once or twice in his youth and early manhood, just as naturally as he felt carnal desire for the dancing mistress at Cherbourg – or the various other women whose physical charms, or the lack of them, he discussed with Greeves. Even during the terrible stress of his fifteen months in the Army, several of them with death imminent and probable, he apparently did not waste his pay ‘on prostitutes, restaurants and tailors, as the gentiles do’.32 And none of the more serious love-affairs that he mentions or suggests in letters and diaries seem to have progressed very far.
The only really overwhelming ‘love-affair’ of his early life, and that to which he may well be referring in Surprised by Joy, was of a kind and took so surprising a turn that it can hardly be classified with the ordinary ‘lusts of the flesh’. His affection for Mrs Moore – his infatuation, as it seemed to his friends and even to his brother who knew him more intimately than any of them – may have started with that incomprehensible passion which attractive middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths: but it very soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute – in many ways a father-substitute also.
When Lewis had been ordered to the front and had telegraphed to his father to come and spend his last day in England with him, Albert Lewis had indeed ‘misunderstood’ the telegram and not come. It might have been a genuine misunderstanding. But in June 1918, when he lay wounded in hospital in London, Lewis wrote several times begging his father to visit him: ‘Come and see me,’ he wrote on 20 June. ‘I am homesick, that is the long and short of it.’33 Warnie later wrote:
One would have thought that it would have been impossible to resist such an appeal as this. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects; in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore for the affection which was apparently denied him at home.34
Lewis was moved from London towards the end of July, to a convalescent home in Ashton Court near Clifton, Bristol, which he chose as it was near Mrs Moore – and there were difficulties in the way of getting into one in Northern Ireland. He was supposed to be there for only two months, but an outbreak of infectious disease which caused the home to be isolated, and his own unexpectedly slow recovery from his wounds, kept him there until mid-October, when he was posted to Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire.
Paddy Moore, who had been with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, had taken part in resisting the great German attack which began on 21 March 1918. He had last been seen on the morning of 24 March, and by September 1918 he was known to have died at Pargny on that day.* When definite news of his death had come through Albert Lewis wrote to commiserate. Mrs Moore replied on 1 October 1918: ‘I just lived my life for my son, and it is very hard to go on now … Of the five boys who came out to us so often at Oxford, Jack is the only one left. I feel that I can never do enough for those that are left. Jack has been so good to me. My poor son asked him to look after me if he did not come back. He possesses for a boy of his age such a wonderful power of understanding and sympathy.’35
Meanwhile Lewis’s first literary venture was taking shape. The embarkation leave in October 1917 had been so curtailed by illness that he was probably able to do little in the way of assembling and copying out his poems during his visit to Belfast. But as soon as he was able to do so in the hospital in London, he set to work on preparing a fair copy that could be typed and sent to a publisher – now with several recent poems to add to those written during the Bookham and Oxford periods – and continued to do so even more industriously when he got to Ashton Court. On 12 September, Lewis wrote to Greeves from Mrs Moore’s home in Ravenswood Road, Bristol:
The best of news! After keeping my MS. for ages Heinemann has actually accepted it … You can imagine how pleased I am, and how eagerly I now look at all Heinemann’s books and wonder what mine will be like. I’m afraid the paper will be poor as it always is now in new books. It is going to be called ‘Spirits in Prison’ by Clive Staples and is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before – that nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.36
On 6 October he was writing to Arthur from Pelham Downs Camp, Ludgershall (near Andover): ‘No, you were wrong, I have not gone on my leave; I was only out for a night at Mrs Moore’s. I have now, however, had my Board, over a month late I’m glad to say, and have been sent for further convalescence to a camp here.’37
‘It is terrible to think how quickly an old order changes and how impossible it is to build it up again exactly the same,’ he wrote on 2 November 1918.
I wonder will there be many changes when we meet again? Maureen told me the other day that I was greatly changed since she first knew me, but, with the impenetrable reticence of a child, declined to say in what way … I made a journey to London to see Heinemanns.* C.S. Evans, the manager, was very nice to me and quite enthusiastic about the book and especially about one piece. John Galsworthy, he said, had read the MS. and wanted to put this piece in a new Quarterly which he is bringing out for disabled soldiers and sailors called Reveille: of course I consented … So at last dreams come to pass and I have sat in the sanctum of a publisher discussing my own book.38
Spirits in Bondage (the name was changed on account of A Spirit in Prison (1908) by Robert Hichens) was delayed in publication on account of a shortage of cloth for binding, and did not come out until 20 March 1919, after the appearance of ‘Death in Battle’ in the February number of Reveille – Lewis’s first publication, other than contributions to school magazines. He was in good company in the third number of Reveille, which included poems by Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Hilaire Belloc; his own poem appeared under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’ on which he had finally decided – his own Christian name and his mother’s maiden name.
It received no special attention (‘graceful and polished’, said The Times; ‘the work is strongly imagined and never unhealthy, trifling or affected’, according to the Scotsman), and Lewis seems to have been rather unduly disappointed. He certainly almost ceased writing lyrics, but turned back none the less to his real literary love, the long narrative poem. While Spirits in Bondage was still in the press he was writing to Greeves (on 2 December 1918, from Officers’ Command Depot, Eastbourne,
to which he had been moved a couple of weeks earlier): ‘I have just finished a short narrative, which is a verse version of our old friend “Dymer”, greatly reduced and altered to my new ideas. The main idea is that of development by self-destruction, both of individuals and species … I am also at work on a short blank verse scene (you can hardly call it a play) between Tristram and King Mark, and a poem on Ion, which is a failure so far.’39
There is no further reference to either the Arthurian or the classical poem, and Dymer in any form seems soon to have been set aside, not to be resumed until 1922.
For great changes were coming, though they threw no shadows before. On 8 December, Lewis wrote to his father: ‘As you have probably seen in the papers, we are all going to get 12 days “Christmas leave”. I use the inverted commas advisedly, as mine seems likely to be in January … I see that we are not to be “discharged”, but “demobilized” and kept on the leash for the rest of our lives.’40 His fear was of being kept in ‘Class Z Reserve’, as he had volunteered and not been conscripted; but physical unfitness due to his wounds procured him a complete discharge. Over twenty years later the piece of shrapnel had to be removed from his chest, and a further result of his experiences at the front seems to have been a ‘distressing weakness’ of the bladder from which he suffered for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile Warnie, who had been in France all this time, and promoted to captain on 29 November, returned to Belfast on leave on 23 December, bitterly disappointed to find that he had once again missed seeing his brother, since their leaves would not overlap. But he was able to record in his diary for 27 December: ‘A red letter day. We were sitting in the study about eleven o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jack! He has been demobilized, thank God. Needless to say there were great doings. He is looking pretty fit … In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honour of the event: the first time I have ever had champagne at home.’41
The festivities over, Lewis was able to return to Oxford early in January to take up his life as an undergraduate where he had left after his one term in the summer of 1917. He wrote to his father on 27 January:
It was a great return and something to be very thankful for. There is of course already a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before: true, we are only twenty-eight in College, but we do dine in Hall again, the Junior Common Room is no longer swathed in dust sheets, and the old round of lectures, debates, games, and whatnot is getting under weigh. The reawakening is a little pathetic: at our first J.C.R. Meeting we read the minutes of the last – 1914. I don’t know any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.42
On account of his war service, Lewis was ‘deemed to have passed’ Responsions and Divinity, and could have proceeded directly to Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’. But in view of his ambition of obtaining a Fellowship in one of the Oxford colleges, his tutor, A.B. Poynton,* advised against doing this. Consequently Lewis embarked at once on the ‘Honour Mods’ course in Greek and Latin literature for the examination in March 1920, before proceeding to the course in Greats in which he would specialize in philosophy and ancient history for a final examination in June 1922.
Meanwhile Oxford was returning to its normal routine and Lewis was falling into it very happily. He would spend all morning working in the college library or attending lectures. Mrs Moore had moved with Maureen to Oxford and they were living nearby in 28 Warneford Road, Headington. Lewis usually lunched and spent the afternoon with Mrs Moore, returning to college for Hall dinner, and work in his rooms, where he was able to have a fire only in the evenings owing to the coal shortage.
Among lectures which he was attending, he was particularly impressed by Cyril Bailey’s† on Lucretius, and, as he wrote to Greeves on 26 January, ‘a piece of good luck – I go to lectures by Gilbert Murray‡ twice a week on Euripides’ “Bacchae”. Luckily I have read the play before and can therefore give him a free-er attention: it is a very weird play (you have read his translation, have you not?) and he is a real inspiration – quite as good as his best books.’43
Lewis did not concern himself with games, but a leisure activity in which he early took part was the literary and debating society of the college, the Martlets, one of the older and more permanent societies of its kind, and one that ‘alone of all College Clubs has its minutes preserved in the Bodleian’.44 The society was limited to twelve members, but Lewis was asked to join and become secretary, ‘the reason being, of course,’ he said to his father on 4 February, ‘that my proposer, Edwards,* was afraid of getting the job himself’;45 two years later he was elected president.
Other contemporaries who were members of the Martlets included Cyril Hartmann,† Rodney Pasley‡ and E.F. Watling,§ and they became his friends during their time at Univ. Lewis’s first paper (12 March 1919) was on William Morris – the subject, too, of almost the last he ever gave to the club, on 5 November 1937; his second paper on ‘William Morris’ was that published in Rehabilitations in 1939. Other subjects on which he spoke as an undergraduate included ‘Narrative Poetry’ and ‘Spenser’, and after he had become a don he returned to give papers on ‘James Stephens’, ‘Boswell’, ‘The Personal Heresy in Poetics’, ‘Is Literature an Art?’ and finally ‘The Kappa Element in Romance’ (14 November 1940), which formed the basis of his essay ‘On Stories’, finally expanded into An Experiment in Criticism in 1961.
Other events of Lewis’s first term included dining with the Master, reading Grace in Hall, and attending tutorials. ‘As time goes on,’ he wrote to his father on 5 March, ‘I appreciate my hours with Poynton more and more. After Smewgy and Kirk I must be rather spoiled in the way of tutors, but this man comes up to either of them.’46 Indeed, Lewis was singularly fortunate in this particular at Oxford, Poynton being followed by E.F. Carritt* for philosophy, and F.P. Wilson† and George Gordon‡ when he came to read for the English School: and students’ success at Oxford can often be made or marred by their tutors.
When term ended on 17 March 1919 Lewis stayed up working for a week, and then went to Bristol to help Mrs Moore move house, but got over to Belfast for part of the vacation. The ‘entanglement’ with Mrs Moore was by now causing his father considerable anxiety, and he wrote to Warnie on 20 May, a month after Lewis had returned to Oxford (via Bristol again):
I confess I do not know what to do or say about Jack’s affair. It worries and depresses me greatly. All I know about the lady is that she is old enough to be his mother – that she is separated from her husband and that she is in poor circumstances. I also know that Jacks has frequently drawn cheques in her favour running up to £10 – for what I don’t know. If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind-hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who had been through the mill, I should not be so uneasy.47
Jack’s involvement with Mrs Moore may or may not have been innocent but he felt that it would be quite impossible to explain it to his father. He had for years been led into taking the easy course and lying to him when lies seemed the only way of keeping the family peace, and now, sadly, he fell back on simple deceit in an attempt to keep his father reasonably happy.
But duplicity led to the inevitable result, and during the following vacation it came to an open quarrel. Albert Lewis, as his own diary shows, was in the habit of reading any letters to his son that he could lay hands on when he was out of the way – and when he incautiously revealed this during an argument over money, Lewis ‘weighed in with a few home truths’.48
The quarrel rankled for some months: Lewis made unnecessarily scathing remarks about his father in letters to Greeves, and Albert Lewis lamented the ‘estrangement from Jacks’ in his diary, blaming himself for not having visited him when wounded, but maintaining that this was unavoidable – and certainly insufficient reason for his son to declare that ‘he doesn’t respect me: that he doesn’t trust me, though he cares for me in a way’.49 The clash of temperaments was too e
xtreme for any real mutual understanding – and had been so for years. But in fact the quarrel cleared the air considerably, and within a year or so Lewis and his father seem to have been back again on much the same terms as before. The visits to Little Lea were resumed, though now much shortened, and both they and the weekly letter became less of an imposition.
Moreover, in spite of his disapproval of the association with Mrs Moore and his only half-hearted approval of the academic life, Albert Lewis not only continued his son’s allowance, but when the scholarship at Univ. came to an end, promised to finance him for three more years while he tried for various fellowships and lecturing appointments – and this in spite of his almost pathological conviction that, well-to-do though he was, he hovered continually on the edge of bankruptcy. Without his father’s aid, Lewis could never have hung on at Oxford until he obtained the fellowship that allowed him to follow the one course of life which provided an opportunity for the full expression of his genius.
But this was far in the future when Lewis returned to Oxford at the end of April 1919 to occupy a new set of rooms at Univ. into which he had begun to move at the end of the previous term. He had distempered the walls ‘a nice quiet greyish blue’ on which his Dürer prints looked well, and procured ‘one good piece of furniture, a small bookcase of dark oak’. ‘You would agree with me,’ he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 5 May, ‘in liking the beam in the ceiling and the deep windows, and the old tree that taps against them recalling Phantastes and Wuthering Heights. When it gets into leaf I shall look out into a mass of greenery with glimpses of the old walls across and of the grass below.’50 In spite of his concentrated efforts for Mods, Lewis was able to fit in some literary work, and he continues:
I have nearly finished the Venus poem and am full of ideas for another, which Gilbert Murray gave me the hint of in a lecture – a very curious legend about Helen, whom Simon Magus, a gnostic magician mentioned in the Acts, found living as a very earthly person in Antioch and gradually recalled to her who she was and took her up to Zeus again, reborn: on their way they had to fight ‘the Dynasties’ or planets – the evil powers that hold the heaven, between us and something really friendly beyond. I have written some of it, but of course I get hardly any time either for reading or writing.51
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