C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Nothing remains of the poem about Helen, but Lewis may have drawn something from his recollections of it near the end of his life when he began his unfinished romance ‘After Ten Years’ about her adventures as a worn and middle-aged woman after the fall of Troy. As for Simon Magus’s ‘Dynasties’, they surely contributed something to the Oyéresu and the Eldila (both good and bad) in Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels.

  In spite of continuing with his ambition to become a poet, Lewis submitted no poems to the various undergraduate periodicals and volumes of Oxford poetry of his day. Oxford after the First World War (as after the Second) produced a generation of undergraduates with unusually high artistic gifts. ‘As nearly everyone here is a poet himself, they have naturally no time left for lionizing others,’ he wrote to his father on 25 May 1919. ‘Indeed, the current literary set is one I could not afford to live in anyway, and though many of them have kindly bought copies of the book,* their tastes run rather to modernism, vers libre, and that sort of thing. I have a holy terror of coteries …’52

  Yet in spite of this professed dislike for coteries, Lewis was trying to form something of the sort at the time of this letter, with two of his Univ. friends, Cyril Hartmann and Rodney Pasley. ‘I don’t think anything, even an undergraduate clique, can live on denials,’ he was writing to Hartmann from Little Lea on 25 July; and later in the correspondence,

  It is no use to attack ‘The Swiss Family Sitwell’ unless we offer something in its place – not perhaps actual work – for we are likely to do that in any case – but at least some new and definite formula. Is it possible to find some common ground, other than mere dislike of eccentricity on which to meet? … I agree that we should not form ourselves into a definite society. Above all we must not take ourselves too seriously … Could people not circulate their things in manuscript and then face an informal meeting in which the others would discuss the victim, who of course could defend himself?53

  The correspondence continued at some length throughout the Long Vacation of 1919, but little came of it, though Lewis’s involvement in the movement is of interest: it shows an early aversion to ‘modernism’ in literature that he never fully overcame, as well as indicating that his thoughts were already turning towards the formation of the kind of unofficial literary group that found fruition years later in the Inklings.

  And indeed Lewis very soon lost contact with the literary movements of the younger members of the university. He was able to give little time to poetry or social activities until the summer of 1920, since he was reading hard for Honour Mods during the three previous terms – and he was able to report to his father on 4 April that ‘I did get a First after all’, which served as sugar to the black draught of a holiday in Somerset ‘with a man who has been asking me for some time to go and “walk” with him’54 and which would keep him from visiting Little Lea that vacation. Jack was really on holiday in Somerset with Mrs Moore and Maureen.

  During the summer of 1920 Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen moved permanently to Oxford, renting various flats in Headington towards the cost of which Lewis contributed. He continued to live in college during term until the following June, when, after the custom of normal undergraduates, he moved out into lodgings – but in his case it was into what was largely his own rented house, shared with the Moores; they had returned to 28 Warneford Road, Headington. Lewis described his ‘usual life’ to Greeves after the move in a letter of June 1921:

  I walk and ride out into the country, sometimes with the family, sometimes alone. I work; I wash up and water the peas and beans in our little garden; I try to write; I meet my friends and go to lectures. In other words I combine the life of an Oxford undergraduate with that of a country householder, a feat which I imagine is seldom performed. Such energies as I have left for general reading go almost entirely on poetry – and little enough of that.55

  In fact, as Warnie Lewis subsequently wrote,

  What had actually happened was that Jack had set up a joint establishment with Mrs Moore, an arrangement which bound him to her service for the next thirty years and ended only with her death in January 1951. How the arrangement came into being no one will ever know, for it was perhaps the only subject which Jack never mentioned to me; more than never mentioned, for on the only occasion when I hinted at my curiosity he silenced me with an abruptness which was sufficient warning never to re-open the topic.56

  There were many drawbacks to this curious state of bondage to which Lewis had voluntarily submitted himself. To begin with, it made him miserably poor at a time when his academic and creative life seemed to demand complete freedom from financial worries. He had an adequate allowance for a bachelor undergraduate living in college or lodgings, but not for a householder with a ‘mother’ and adopted sister largely dependent on him. And he could not, of course, ask his father to increase his allowance as the whole ‘set-up’ with the Moores was kept a secret from him.

  While Lewis clearly enjoyed the family life Mrs Moore made possible, even his own diary suggests that she was highly possessive and selfish – or thoughtless – to an astonishing degree. Lewis was expected to help with the housework and run errands for her, even when they were able to employ two resident maids, a daily and a handyman-gardener. ‘I came to live with him after my retirement from the Army in 1932,’ wrote Warnie Lewis, ‘and in the vacation we shared a workroom. I do not think I ever saw Jack at his desk for more than half an hour without Mrs Moore calling for him. “Coming!” Jack would roar, down would go his pen, and he would be away perhaps five minutes, perhaps half an hour; and then return and calmly resume work on a half-finished sentence.’57

  Owen Barfield met Lewis in 1919 and after being introduced to Mrs Moore in 1922 he was a frequent visitor to their home. Over the years he and his wife came to know Mrs Moore well, and in a Foreword he wrote for All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927 (1991), he attempted to balance Warnie’s account of her. ‘I find it strange to recall,’ he said,

  that during those early years I was given no hint at all of that household background. He was simply a fellow undergraduate and later a literary and philosophical friend. I remember him telling me on one occasion that he had to get back in order to clear out the oven in the gas cooker, and I took it to be something that would happen once in a blue moon. It is only from the Diary that I have learnt what a substantial part of his time and energy was being consumed in helping to run Mrs Moore’s household, and also how much of that was due to the shadow of sheer poverty that remained hanging over them both until at last he obtained his fellowship … One of the things that make me welcome its appearance in print is, that it will do much to rectify the false picture that has been painted of her as a kind of baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress. It is a picture that first appeared as early as 1966 in the introductory Memoir to W.H. Lewis’s Letters of C.S. Lewis, and it has frequently reappeared in the prolific literature on C.S. Lewis which has since been published here and there. If she imposed some burdens on him, she saved him from others by taking them on herself even against his protestations. Moreover she was deeply concerned to further his career.58

  The most immediate result of Lewis’s double life when he moved out of college was to prevent him from following up the lead given by even the relative success of Spirits in Bondage and his first tentative steps towards taking his place among the new, young poets of the twenties, or of entering into any kind of literary life outside the ordinary university round. A proposed anthology did not appear, and there were no more letters to Hartmann and Pasley about founding their own poetic movement. With his great mental ability and his developing powers of concentration, Lewis was just able to take a Double First in Literae Humaniores – Mods in March 1920 and Greats in June 1922. He also competed for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, the subject set being ‘Optimism’, and won it triumphantly on 24 May 1921.

  Another interesting experience about this time was two meetings with W.B. Yeats, then l
iving in Oxford, which he described fully to his brother in a letter of 21 March 1921. Yeats seems to have made a considerable impression on Lewis, who modelled the physical appearance of his magician in Dymer on him:59 ‘If he were now alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality with such freedom,’ he wrote in the preface to the new edition of 1950. ‘It was not done in malice, and the likeness is not, I think, in itself, uncomplimentary.’60 And something of this grander Yeats may have helped to create Merlin in That Hideous Strength.

  The visits to Yeats were among the more interesting highlights of the Oxford side of Lewis’s double existence during the years before he graduated from the Junior to the Senior Common Room. It would be possible to follow him in considerable detail through these years with the aid of copious letters to his brother, regular reports to his father and, from April 1922, a reasonably full diary which he continued, with occasional lapses, until March 1927 – but both letters and diaries are well represented, with long extracts, in the various editions of his letters and All My Road Before Me. The diary, though of great interest from an external point of view, tells little or nothing of Lewis’s spiritual adventures: it was, indeed, almost a public document and was read out loud from time to time to Mrs Moore and her daughter, or handed over to Warnie to peruse when on leave.

  Already in 1921 Lewis had made up his mind that an academic career was what he most hankered after – and if possible an academic career in Oxford. But it seemed an almost impossible ambition. On 18 May 1922, however, ideas for the future were taking more definite shape, and he was writing to his father that one of his tutors, to whom he went for a testimonial,

  instead of giving me one advised me very earnestly not to take any job in a hurry; he said that if there was nothing for me in Oxford immediately after Greats, he was sure there would be something later: that College would almost certainly continue my scholarship for another year if I chose to stay up and take another school, and that ‘if I could possibly afford it’ this was the course which he would like me to take.61

  He mentioned in the same letter that another tutor pointed out that

  the actual subjects of my own Greats school are a doubtful quantity at the moment: for no one quite knows what place classics and philosophy will hold in the educational world in a year’s time. On the other hand, the prestige of the Greats school is still enormous: so that what is wanted everywhere is a man who combined the general qualification which Greats is supposed to give, with the special qualifications of any other subjects. And English Literature is a ‘rising’ subject. Thus if I could take a First, or even a Second, in Greats, and a First next year in English Literature, I should be in a very strong position indeed … In such a course I should start knowing more of the subject than some do at the end: it ought to be a very easy proposition compared with Greats.62

  Lewis went on to inform his father that he could pretty certainly get a job at once as a schoolmaster, though his inability to play games might count against him – but that ‘the point on which I naturally like to lean is that the pundits at Univ. apparently don’t want me to leave Oxford’.63 To this Albert Lewis responded generously, and in the end continued his son’s allowance until he obtained his fellowship at Magdalen in September 1925. Meanwhile Lewis was awarded a First in Greats, which was announced on 4 August 1922, the day before he took his BA, L.R. Farnell, the Vice-Chancellor and Rector of Exeter College, performing the ceremony.

  A typical extract from Lewis’s diary may serve to round off the picture of that Summer Term of 1922. On 24 May he wrote:

  I left home at about 12.45 and bussed into Oxford, meeting Barfield outside the ‘Old Oak’ … From here we walked to Wadham gardens and sat under the trees. We began with Christina Dreams: I condemned them – the love dream made a man incapable of real love, the hero dream made him a coward. He took the opposite view, and a stubborn argument followed.* We then turned to ‘Dymer’ which he had brought back: to my surprise his verdict was even more favourable than Baker’s.† He said it was ‘by streets’ the best thing I had done, and ‘Could I keep it up?’ … He said Harwood had ‘danced with joy’ over it and had advised me to drop everything else and go on with it. From such a severe critic as Barfield the result was very encouraging … The conversation ranged over many topics and finally died because it was impossible to hold a court between two devil’s advocates. The gardens were ripping – lilac and chestnut magnificent. I find Wadham gardens fit my image of Acrasia’s island very well.* I walked with him as far as Magdalen, took a turn in the cloisters, and then came home for tea. Went in again to Carritt at 5.45 and read him my paper. Interesting discussion: he was on his usual line of right unrelated to good, which is unanswerable: but so is the other side …64

  We may note that Lewis had begun seriously on Dymer on 2 April and finished Canto I, more or less as published, by 11 May.65 The references to Christina Dreams and Acrasia’s ‘Bower of Bliss’ in the diary tie up with the poem, as Lewis recorded in the preface to the 1950 reprint of Dymer. There he points out how strong had been his ‘romantic longing’ for the ‘Hesperian or Western Garden system’ of imagery, and how ‘by the time I wrote Dymer I had come under the influence of our common obsession about Christina Dreams, into a state of revolt against that spell … In all this, as I now believe, I was mistaken. Instead of repenting my idolatry I spat upon the images which only my own misunderstanding greed had ever made into idols.’66

  Nevertheless, in a letter of 16 September 1945 he was warning Roger Lancelyn Green against the subtler dangers of the Christina Dream as revealed in an early version of his fantasy story, The Wood that Time Forgot:

  Now for a matter which I would not mention if it were not that you and I (obviously) can converse with the freedom of patients in the same hospital. None of these faults is purely literary. The talent is certain: but you have a sickness in the soul. You are much too much in that enchanted wood yourself – and perhaps with no very powerful talisman round your neck. You are in love with your heroine – which is author’s incest and always spoils a book. I know all about it because I’ve been in the wood too. It took me years to get out of it: and only after I’d done so did re-enchantment begin. If you try to stay there the wood will die on you – and so will you!67

  Of the companions mentioned in the diary extracts, Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy:

  The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A.K. Hamilton Jenkin, since known for his books on Cornwall* … My next was Owen Barfield. There is a sense in which Arthur [Greeves] and Barfield are the types of every man’s First Friend and Second Friend. The First is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights … But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything. He is not so much the alter ego as the anti-self. Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle … Closely linked with Barfield of Wadham was his friend (and soon mine) A.C. Harwood of The House, later a pillar of Michael Hall, the Steinerite school at Kidbrooke. He was different from either of us; a wholly imperturbable man.68

  On 11 June, a few days after he began sitting for Greats, Lewis went for a long walk up Hinksey Hill, ‘sat down in the patch of wood – all ferns and pines and the very driest sand and the landscape towards Wytham of an almost polished brightness. Got a whiff of the real Joy, but only momentary.’69 Schools over, he tried for a lectureship in Classics at Reading under E.R. Dodds,† later Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, but without success.

  In August Lewis and the ‘family’ moved again, this time to Hillsboro, 14 Holyoake Road, Headington, and in mid-September he spent ten days with his father at Little Lea. Warnie was also there, and the atmosphere seemed less strained. Arthur Greeves was at home, but Lewis noted that although they saw each other frequently, ‘we found practically nothing to say to each other’,70 for,
though he may not have realized it in such terms, Lewis’s mind had outgrown Greeves’s, and he needed the more stimulating friendship of men such as Jenkin and Barfield and Harwood, and others whom he was soon to meet, notably Nevill Coghill,* Hugo Dyson† and J.R.R. Tolkien.‡

  Back in Oxford he was trying for a classical fellowship at Magdalen, having an interview with the President, Sir Herbert Warren, and sitting for the examination during the last week of September – but without success. Accordingly on 13 October 1922 he began his more formal work for the English School by visiting his new tutor, F.P. Wilson, at that time attached to Exeter College. ‘Wilson was not there,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘but I found him at his house in Manor Place. He tells me I shall have my work cut out to manage the work in time’71 (the English course normally took over two years, following Mods or Pass Mods). Next day he went to St Hugh’s College in search of his language tutor, Miss E.E. Wardale, author of An Old English Grammar (1922);* and soon Lewis was revelling in Old English under her skilled supervision. ‘It is very curious,’ he wrote in his diary on 15 October, ‘that to read the words of King Alfred gives more sense of antiquity than to read those of Sophocles. Also, to be thus realizing a dream of learning Anglo-Saxon which dates from Bookham days.’72

  Now that he had to write essays on English literature, with the finest examples in the language daily before him, Lewis began to think about his own literary performance: ‘My prose style is really abominable, and between poetry and work I suppose I shall never learn to improve it,’73 he confided sadly to his diary of 17 October. In later life he was to achieve one of the finest and most lucid prose styles of any writer of his period.