Lewis was delighted when Sir Henry Willink’s college offered him a fellowship with rooms in St Mary Magdalene. Because Lewis needed to wind up his affairs in Oxford, it was agreed that although his election was from 1 October 1954, there was a dispensation until 1 January 1955. His election to the Cambridge chair was announced with others in The Times of 4 October 1954: ‘With the opening of the new academic year the following appointments have been announced … Professor C.S. Lewis, as first holder of the new Professorship of Medieval and Renaissance Literature.’ Sister Penelope wrote to him about it, and Lewis replied on 30 July 1954:
Yes, I’ve been made Professor of ‘Medieval & Renaissance English’ at Cambridge: the scope of the chair (a new one) suits me exactly. But it won’t be as big a change as you might think. I shall still live at Oxford in the Vac. and on many week ends in term. My address will be Magdalene, so I remain under the same Patroness. This is nice because it saves ‘Admin’ re-adjustments in Heaven: also I can’t help feeling that the dear lady now understands my constitution better than a stranger would.32
Oxford was clearly embarrassed about what had happened. Lewis told Walter Hooper that immediately after he had accepted the Chair at Cambridge he was offered one by Oxford. He gave the impression that it was a Chair especially designed, or redesigned, for him. Hooper asked why he didn’t accept it and save himself the trouble of a move. ‘No,’ said Lewis, ‘Cambridge had gone to so much trouble, and as I’d already accepted, it would have been uncharitable to back out.’ So, while he had the satisfaction of being offered a Professorship in Oxford, he never regretted the migration to the ‘other place’. ‘I have exchanged the impenitent for the penitent Magdalen,’ was how Lewis described the change to Nevill Coghill. Penitent Oxford tried to get Lewis back in 1957 when F.P. Wilson retired from the Merton Professorship, but Lewis remained faithful to his new university – and had indeed made one of the happiest decisions of his career when agreeing to go to the ‘other place’ in 1954.
Jack and Warnie planned to celebrate the end of these deliberations with a three-week holiday in County Donegal, after which Jack planned to spend a week with Arthur Greeves. On 6 August, the day they were to leave, Jack wrote to Arthur saying: ‘We ought to have been crossing tonight, but Warnie is in a nursing home (the usual thing). I will get across by hook or crook for my jaunt with you, arriving Crawfordsburn Monday, August 30th.’33 It turned out that after a week in ‘Restholme’ Warnie was well enough to travel and he and Jack had a week together in the south of Ireland, after which Jack joined Arthur.
On his return home Lewis had the satisfaction of seeing his massive ‘O Hell!’ volume, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama, published on 16 September 1954. Many consider it his greatest work of scholarship. When the Delegates of the Oxford University Press conceived the idea of ‘The Oxford History of English Literature’ in 1935, their intention was to publish twelve volumes covering the whole sweep of English literature – from Middle English up to writers of the twentieth century. Lewis was asked to undertake the sixteenth century, and he is one of the few who managed to complete the task given him.
During the nine or more years during which Lewis was preparing and writing this his most onerous academic labour, it had inevitably become rather more of a chore than a pleasure as the work drew to a close. It was overlapping the Narnian books and keeping him from other schemes that by now seemed more worthwhile, and he confided to Green that he was longing for the day when he would be able to turn away from ‘this critical nonsense and write something really worthwhile – theology and fantasy’. The main body of the book was well out of the way by 1952, but on 16 July 1953 he wrote to Green about another proposed trip to North Wales in search of castles:
Look: I think I must abandon the idea of an expedition on my way back from Ireland, for this year. It is becoming clear that I shan’t finish the proofs and horrible bibliography of my OHEL volume before we sail on Aug. 11th. That being so, every day between our return and the beginning of Michaelmas Term becomes precious as gold: for if the job once drags on into another term, I don’t know what will become of me.34
For whatever reason, the book did not meet with anything like as much approval as The Allegory of Love or even A Preface to ‘Paradise Lost’. Nevertheless, ‘The merits of this book are very great indeed’, Helen Gardner summed up in her British Academy obituary:
It is, to begin with, a genuine literary history. It is perfectly apparent which poets and which poems Lewis thinks ‘the best’, and the book exemplifies again and again his gift for summing up the peculiar virtues of a work, and his genius for the brief, pregnant quotation that gives the quiddity of a writer. But he respected the nature of his commission and attempted to provide a continuous narrative history of literature in the century. The volume satisfies his own criterion of a good literary history: it tells us what works exist and puts them in their setting. The book is also brilliantly written, compulsively readable, and constantly illuminated by sentences that are as true as they are witty. Who else could have written a literary history that continually arouses delighted laughter! There is hardly a page that does not stimulate and provoke thought.35
Looking ahead almost fifty years, to the centenary of Lewis’s birth in 1998, it is instructive to see how his literary criticism has fared. Of the thousands of pages devoted to assessing Lewis’s writings in 1998, few dealt with his criticism. And of those few, the one article that puts it most in perspective is found in the Times Literary Supplement, where Hal Jensen said in his article entitled ‘Dream of One Careful Reader’: ‘Controversialist in his time, happy to be of no party, Lewis is now borne aloft by a massed force of zealous assenters … For all this, Lewis is in need of rehabilitation.’
Jensen notes two reasons why Lewis’s critical writings have not had the influence that was predicted for them on their publication. The first is that ‘the vast conception of Lewis’s books is outmoded. Fearless attempts to range from Homeric epic to Kipling, to encompass a theory of allegory and the history of courtly love … to trace words like nature and wit throughout the history of language and literature, or to provide a complete model of medieval thought, are at odds with the prevailing fashion for historical relativity and textual instability.’ The other reason is Lewis’s unacademic style: ‘In its time, his vigorous prose was regarded as revitalizing, if sometimes too rich. Its manner is unpalatable for many of today’s literary scholars, who like to treat their subject scientifically … Their very closeness to the matter they discuss renders them – to the extent that they are readable – unreliable.’
Jensen’s conclusion is that it is not as scholarship that Lewis’s critical works should primarily be read. ‘They are themselves literature,’ he says. Lewis’s OHEL volume
can claim to be one of the great prose works of the century … In the Oxford volume, Lewis brings literature itself to life. Narnia is as nothing compared with the fantastic creatures we come across here … Few now believe in the magical world of literature to which Lewis’s criticism transports us. As with Lucy, when she first re-emerged from Narnia, Lewis’s medieval and Renaissance storytelling is met with incredulity: ‘You’ve had your joke, hadn’t you better stop now?’ Lewis, in his centenary year, needs rehabilitation not as a Christian, nor as the author of children’s fiction, but as an exemplary reader: a man whose best books were about books.36
Sometime before the publication of the OHEL volume Bill Gresham had filed for a divorce from Joy on the grounds of desertion and incompatibility. In Miami, Florida, on 5 August 1954 Gresham received his divorce from Joy and the same day he married Renée Pierce.
In 1953 Kathleen Nott had published The Emperor’s Clothes, described as ‘An attack on the dogmatic orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot, Graham Greene, Dorothy L. Sayers, C.S. Lewis and others’. Dorothy L. Sayers insisted on a debate, and one was scheduled for 27 October 1954 in St Anne’s Church, Soho, London. On learning of it, Lewis promised Miss Sayers on 12 June
that he would be present for the ‘Nicking of Nott’. At the last minute, however, Kathleen Nott pulled out, leaving her friend G.S. Frazer to face Dorothy L. Sayers before a large and lively audience.37 Joy’s parents, Joseph and Jeannette Davidman, were visiting her from New York, and Lewis met them for tea before the debate. Afterwards he introduced them to Miss Sayers. Writing about the occasion to Bill Gresham two days later, Joy described her as an ‘enormously witty and very eloquent speaker, a forthright old lady who wears rather mannish clothes and doesn’t give a damn about her hairdo’.38
Lewis was soon in London again to visit Joy at her flat in the annexe of the Avoca House Hotel. Joy and the boys had become friends with an Australian family who were staying there, and Joy wanted them to meet Lewis. The Reverend Leslie Llewelyn Elliott arrived there in November 1954 with his wife and their two sons, Peter and Paul, on a leave from his Anglican parish in Melbourne to organize an international trade fair. The elder of the Elliott boys, writing forty years later as Monsignor Peter J. Elliott* of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for the Family, remembered the occasion well:
One evening Joy announced that C.S. Lewis was in London and would like to meet us. Some time later he strode into the hotel dining room where we had just finished supper. I can still see him through the eyes of an eleven-year-old, who had already devoured and savoured three of his Narnian books.
Here was the ‘great man’ who could take you into another world, more wonderful and exciting than shabby Post-War London or the suburban sprawl of Melbourne. But I had the same disconcerting surprise experienced by many others on first meeting Lewis. Instead of what one expected, that is, an ascetical academic, one was confronted by a country squire. He was plump and tweedy, with a round ruddy face, a pipe, balding dark hair and two bright twinkling mirthful eyes. Those eyes … they glinted with joy, Christian joy looking out confidently at the created world, knowing that, in spite of old Screwtape and the ‘Great Divorce,’ it is still ‘good’ …
My last memory of those months in London was the day when my mother announced that Joy would marry Lewis – an assertion which shocked my father. Joy had taken mother and Paul on a day trip to Oxford. It turned out to be a prolonged pilgrimage to Magdalen College, with a running commentary about Lewis: ‘That was his room, June, and he used to walk here …’ At that time, Lewis was away from Oxford, but mother felt that, as far as Joy was concerned, he was still there. She could see that this devoted woman loved the brilliant, but ingenuous man, and that she was determined to marry him.39
Joy clearly had other ideas than those of simple intellectual friendship, and Lewis took fright. Joy was no longer invited to stay at The Kilns: Lewis was even known to have hidden upstairs and pretended to be out when he saw her coming up the drive.
Warnie noted in his diary of 3 December 1954: ‘J finished his last tutorial at ten minutes to one today: after twenty nine years of it.’40 Lewis did not move to Cambridge until the New Year, but his inaugural lecture as the new Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English, ‘De Descriptione Temporum’, was given in Cambridge on 29 November 1954 – his fifty-sixth birthday. His vast audience included many friends from Oxford, including Joy Davidman.
‘From the formula “Medieval and Renaissance”,’ he said, ‘I inferred that the University was encouraging my own belief that the barrier between those two ages had been exaggerated, if indeed it was not largely a figment of Humanist propaganda.’41 ‘Unhappily,’ he went on, ‘we cannot as historians dispense with periods … If we do not put the Great Divide between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, where should we put it? … I have come to regard as the greatest of all divisions in the history of the West, that which divides the present from, say, the age of Jane Austen and Scott.’42 Everything, he said, before the age of Jane Austen constituted one period, ‘Old Western Culture’. After considering changes in the political order, art, and religion, Lewis reminded his audience that
Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines. This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered … How has it come about that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation’, with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’? Why does the word ‘primitive’ at once suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity? … Whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world … I conclude that it really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man.43
‘It is my settled conviction’, he ended, ‘that in order to read Old Western literature aright you must suspend most of the responses and unlearn most of the habits you have acquired in reading modern literature.’44
Writing to Chad Walsh on 23 December 1954, Joy said she would be unsurprised to see Lewis ‘strike roots in Cambridge and move there altogether after a couple of years’. She described his inaugural lecture as
brilliant, intellectually exciting, unexpected, and funny as hell – as you can imagine. The hall was crowded, and there were so many capped and gowned dons in the front rows that they looked like a rookery. Instead of talking in the usual professional way about the continuity of culture, the value of traditions, etc, he announced that ‘Old Western Culture,’ as he called it, was practically dead, leaving only a few scattered survivors like himself … How that man loves being in a minority, even a lost-cause minority! Athanasius contra mundum, or Don Quixote against the windmills … He talked blandly of ‘post-Christian Europe,’ which I thought rather previous of him. I sometimes wonder what he would do if Christianity really did triumph everywhere; I suppose he would have to invent a new heresy.45
Lewis took up residence in Magdalene College, Cambridge on 7 January 1955. Magdalene, like its sister college in Oxford, was founded in the fifteenth century. It was originally established by the Benedictine Order for student monks, when it was known as Monk’s Hostel. Coming under the patronage of the Duke of Buckingham in 1472, it was greatly enlarged and changed its name to Buckingham College. After the Reformation the college underwent a great many changes and it was refounded in 1542 as the College of St Mary Magdalene.
Lewis was given a beautiful set of rooms on the second floor of First Court above the Parlour and the Old Library. From the start he was very busy; during his first term, between 11 January and 11 March 1955, he gave a twice-weekly series of lectures entitled ‘Prolegomena to the Study of Our Earlier Poetry’. And, while he had no pupils to tutor, he greatly missed Warnie’s help with correspondence. He answered nearly all his letters by himself. During his second term, between 19 April and 10 June, he lectured twice a week on Milton.
It was during this whirl of activity that Lewis returned to one of his oldest loves – the story of Cupid and Psyche. According to The Golden Ass by Apuleius (b. AD 125), a king and queen have a daughter, Psyche, who is so beautiful that men treat her as a goddess and neglect the worship of Venus. Venus, jealous of her beauty, subjects her to a number of tasks. Venus’s son, Cupid, on seeing Psyche falls in love and prepares a palace for her. He visits her by night, but forbids Psyche seeing his face. Psyche’s two sisters are devoured by envy and plot to destroy her happiness. They persuade Psyche that her husband is a monster, and entice her to look at the sleeping god. When Psyche drops some hot oil on his shoulder, Cupid awakes. He rebukes her and vanishes. She is able to regain Cupid’s love only by long and painful wandering. In the end Jupiter allows them to marry and Psyche is made a goddess.
In his diary of 23 November 1922 Lewis said, ‘After lunch I went out for a walk up Shotover, thinking how to make a masque or play of Psyche and Caspian.’46 He returned to the theme in his diary of 9 September 1923: ‘My head was very full of my old idea of a poem on my own version of
the Cupid and Psyche story in which Psyche’s sister would not be jealous, but unable to see anything but moors when Psyche showed her the Palace. I have tried it twice before, once in couplets and once in ballad form.’47
The first of these may have been the ‘masque or play’ that he was trying to work out during his walk on Shotover in November 1922; of the second about seventy lines survive, which show that Caspian was Psyche’s sister, ‘the child of the first marriage of the King’, who had brought up Psyche (and her brother Jardis – Lewis’s addition to the legend) since they were babies.
The fragment, so far as it goes, parallels the earlier part of the legend as adapted in Till We Have Faces: it is not merely the anger of Venus, because Psyche is being worshipped as a goddess instead of her, that causes the people to sacrifice Psyche:
The tale of Psyche is unjustly told
And half the truth concealed by all who hold
With Apuleius. Famous poets sing
That once upon a time there lived a king
Whose daughter was so fair that from the sky
Venus beheld her with an evil eye;
And afterwards, for Venus’ hate, they say
By singing priests the girl was led away
And left upon the hills in fetters where
An old, big sacred serpent kept his lair
Among grey rocks. So far they tell it right:
Only – it was no fabled Venus’ spite
That drove them to this thing; but summer rains
Withheld and harvest withering on the plains.
The streams were low, and in the starving tribe
Ran murmurs that of old a dearer bribe
Had charmed the rain. Forgotten customs then
Stirred in their sleep below the hearts of men
C. S. Lewis Page 45
