C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  * Lewis was writing an introduction entitled ‘Edmund Spenser, 1552–99’ for Major British Writers, Vol. I, ed. G.B. Harrison (1954). It was reprinted in Lewis’s Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1966).

  * Geoffrey Victor Smithers (1909–2000) came up to Oxford in 1930 as a Rhodes Scholar for Natal and took a First in English from Hertford College. He was Assistant Lecturer in English at King’s College, London, 1936, and a lecturer in English Language at University College, London, 1938–54. In 1954 he became Reader in Medieval English at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Merton College. He was Professor of English at the University of Durham, 1960–74. His publications include Kyng Alisaunder, Vol. I (1952), Vol. II (1957); with J.A.W. Bennett and Norman Davis, Early English Verse and Prose (1966), and Havelok (1987).

  * Sir Henry Urmston Willink (1894–1973), lawyer, politician, and academic, was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He served with the Royal Field Artillery in the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross. He was called to the Bar in 1920 and for many years he combined a legal career with politics. It was, however, as the Master of Magdalene College, 1948–66, that he was happiest and most successful.

  * Monsignor Peter J. Elliott, a member of the Pontifical Council for the Family, 1988–98, in 1999 became Episcopal Vicar for Religious Education for the Archdiocese of Melbourne, Australia.

  * Katharine Dorothy Farrer (1911–72) was brought up in Hertfordshire where her father was an Anglican clergyman. She was educated at St Anne’s College, Oxford, where she read Classics. After taking her BA she taught for a while. In 1937 she married Austin Farrer, and they lived in Trinity College, Oxford, where Dr Farrer was Fellow and Chaplain. Over the years Katharine Farrer published several detective novels, The Missing Link (1952), Cretan Counterfeit (1954) and Gownsman’s Gallows (1957). What she called her only ‘straight’ novel was At Odds with Morning (1960). She was one of the first of Lewis’s friends to be introduced to Joy Davidman, and she and her husband did much to help her.

  * Jocelyn Easton Gibb (1907–79) was the son of the distinguished engineer Sir Alexander Gibb. He was educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and took his first step in publishing when he joined Methuen & Co. in the 1930s. He had earlier become a Territorial in the Royal Wiltshire Yeomanry, and he left Methuen to serve in the Second World War. He was released as a lieutenant-colonel at the end of the war. He joined the firm of Geoffrey Bles as production manager and it was he who guided many of Lewis’s books through the press. On his retirement in 1974, Lewis’s books were taken over by William Collins & Sons.

  NOTES

  1 BF, p. 226.

  2 TST, p. 512.

  3 Ibid., pp. 513–14.

  4 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 83.

  5 Ibid., fols 122–3.

  6 BF, p. 233.

  7 TST, p. 517.

  8 Letters, p. 410.

  9 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 30.

  10 BF, p. 244.

  11 Joy Davidman, ‘The Longest Way Round’, These Found the Way: Thirteen Converts to Protestant Christianity, pp. 15–16.

  12 Foreword, Smoke on the Mountain: The Ten Commandments in Terms of Today (3rd impression, 1955), pp. 7–8.

  13 BF, p. 244.

  14 Lyle Dorsett, And God Came In: The Extraordinary Story of Joy Davidman, her Life and Marriage to C.S. Lewis (1983), ch. 3, pp. 88–9.

  15 Ibid., pp. 90–1.

  16 Douglas Gresham, Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C.S. Lewis (1988), ch. 2, p. 17.

  17 CG, p. 62.

  18 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 3, p. 93.

  19 Ibid., p. 104.

  20 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fols 120–1.

  21 Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, pp. 424–5.

  22 John Constable, ‘C.S. Lewis: From Magdalen to Magdalene’, Critical Essays on C.S. Lewis, p. 47. The correspondence between Lewis, Sir Henry Willink, and the Electors over Lewis’s election is found in the Magdalene College Archives, Group F, Private Papers. From these papers Constable wrote an account of Lewis’s move from Oxford to Cambridge, ‘C.S. Lewis: From Magdalen to Magdalene’, which was published in Magdalene College Magazine and Record, 32, 1988, pp. 42–6, and reprinted in the volume cited above. The fullest treatment of Lewis’s election to the Cambridge Chair is found in Brian Barbour’s ‘Lewis and Cambridge’, Modern Philology, vol. 96, No. 4 (May 1999).

  23 Ibid.

  24 Ibid., p. 49.

  25Ibid.

  26 Ibid.

  27 Ibid., p. 50.

  28 Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, pp. 427–8.

  29 ‘C.S. Lewis: From Magdalen to Magdalene’, p. 50.

  30 Ibid.

  31 Barbour, ‘Lewis and Cambridge’, p. 465.

  32 Letters, p. 439.

  33 TST, p. 531.

  34 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 50.

  35 Gardner, ‘Clive Staples Lewis 1898–1963’, pp. 426–7.

  36 TLS (4 December 1998), pp. 6–7.

  37 See the account by John Wren-Lewis, ‘The Chester-Lewis’, The Chesterton Review, vol. XVII, nos 3, 4 (August, November 1991), pp. 562–5.

  38 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 4, p. 111.

  39 Mgr Peter J. Elliott, ‘A Child’s Memories of C.S. Lewis’, In Review: Living Books Past and Present, I (Summer 1994), pp. 33–6.

  40 BF, p. 242.

  41 Selected Literary Essays, p. 6.

  42 Ibid., p. 7.

  43 Ibid., pp. 10–11.

  44 Ibid., p. 13.

  45 Marion E. Wade Center.

  46 AMR, p. 142.

  47 Ibid., p. 266.

  48 LP VIII, p. 163.

  49 Ibid., p. 164.

  50 Ibid.

  51 Dorsett, And God Came In, ch. 4, pp. 116–17.

  52 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 204.

  53 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 121, fol. 50.

  54 Bodleian Library, Dep. 772, fol. 138.

  55 Ibid., fol. 140.

  56 Till We Have Faces (1956; Fount, 1998), Part II, ch. 4, p. 223.

  57 Bodleian Library, Dep. 772, fol. 145.

  58 Roger Lancelyn Green, ‘Notes on After Ten Years’, The Dark Tower, p. 156.

  59 Till We Have Faces, Part I, ch. 20, pp. 174–5.

  60 ‘After Ten Years’, The Dark Tower, p. 153.

  61 Letters, pp. 462–3.

  62 The Four Loves, ch. 3, p. 45.

  63 Ibid., ch. 4, p. 64.

  64 A Grief Observed, with an Afterword by Chad Walsh (New York: Bantam, 1976), p. 140.

  13

  MARRIAGE

  Perhaps exaggerating a little for effect, Lewis declared to several of his Oxford friends that he had gone to Cambridge expecting the worst – and at Magdalene found himself back in a college more like those he had known as a young man than any in the slapdash cafeteria atmosphere of so many at Oxford since the Second World War. ‘It’s like Magdalen or Merton as we knew them before the war,’ he said, when inviting a friend to stay at Magdalene for the first time; and, after a string of eulogies ended with a sudden impressive pause, and concluded with his superb timing: ‘But I must warn you of one thing … we only get one glass of port after dinner!’

  It took him a little time to fit comfortably into his new place at Magdalene: the other Fellows found him at first a trifle over-assertive. One of the first of the Fellows to make friends with him was Dr Richard Ladborough, University Lecturer in French.* ‘It was not that he outshone all in conversation,’ said Dr Ladborough, ‘but that he felt that brilliance was expected … It was Lewis who first broke the ice. I remember how grateful I felt when I, perhaps among others, received a little note from him in his crabbed handwriting: “Dear Dick, May I call you that? Yours, Jack.”1 Ladborough recalls:

  Lewis was frequently jovial, and not only delighted in hearing funny stories but also in telling them, and in this he was an expert. No one was l
ess like the puritanical, tight-lipped moralist which some people thought he was after reading The Screwtape Letters. Some of his own stories were certainly not prudish, though never obscene. They were meant for men only, and indeed in certain respects Lewis was what is sometimes known as ‘a man’s man’. He liked, for instance, to talk about his experiences in the Army during World War I, and to hear those of others.

  His rooms in College, which with their panelling and antique appearance, could have been made attractive with little cost and even with little thought, were, it seemed to me, merely a laboratory for his work and his writings. Here he would sit with pen and ink, in a hard chair before an ugly table and write for hours on end. Indeed, he seemed to be oblivious to his immediate surroundings, although I suppose that the beauty of them in both his universities must have had an effect upon him …

  It is now common knowledge that his memory was prodigious and that he seemed to have read everything. The authors and books I liked hearing him talk about most were, I think, some of his own favourites: Dr Johnson (with whom he had many affinities), Jane Austen, Stevenson’s The Wrong Box, and – curiously perhaps – that pearl of schoolboy stories, Anstey’s Vice Versa: I never tired of hearing him recite from memory the German lesson of the superbly humourless Herr Stohwasser.

  The one author he was usually silent about was himself. Little did we know, or even guess when he dined with us in Hall of an evening, that he had been engaged in penning during the day one of his magna opera. He was silent even when occupied in translating the Psalms into the new version. As is known, he had illustrious colleagues in this task, including, for example, T.S. Eliot. But he was unforthcoming about the whole enterprise. Again, I think this was partly due to his modesty and to his reticence. No man was less given to name-dropping, and no one was ever less of a snob.2

  According to Dr Ladborough, Lewis

  was essentially a College rather than a University man. He rarely seemed to be interested in the affairs of the University as a whole, or even (and this was a fault) in those of his own faculty. He never attempted to master regulations. He hardly ever read The Reporter, the University’s official journal, and it was some time before he discovered its existence. But, as time went on, he became more and more interested in College affairs, in some, of course, more than others. He was ignorant of anything to do with finance, and during debates on figures his eyes closed and he was even known to snore. But it might surprise some people to know that, when genuinely interested, administration did not entirely pass him by. I suspect that few would guess that one passage in The Reporter on a particularly intricate subject dealing with the relationship between the University and the Colleges was penned largely by the hand of C.S. Lewis.3

  Lewis could not help but hear about the Mission that Billy Graham was giving in Cambridge during November 1955. The great evangelist was invited there by the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union. However, from the moment the man stepped on to English soil, he was assailed by a barrage of criticism, and there was so much worry about his safety that security precautions had to be taken. On Saturday, 5 November, Billy Graham called on Lewis. Said Graham,

  We met in the dining room of his college, St Mary Magdalene, and we talked for an hour or more. I was afraid I would be intimidated by him because of his brilliance, but he immediately put me at my ease. I found him to be not only intelligent and witty but also gentle and gracious; he seemed genuinely interested in our meetings. ‘You know,’ he said as we parted, ‘you have many critics, but I have never met one of your critics who knows you personally.’4

  During Michaelmas Term Lewis gave a series of twice-weekly lectures on ‘Some Major Texts: Latin and Continental Vernacular’; he had no lectures during Lent Term 1956. During Easter Term 1956 he gave his first set of twice-weekly lectures on ‘Some Difficult Words’, which he later published as Studies in Words (1960).

  Shortly after he arrived in Cambridge Lewis was asked to compare Oxford and Cambridge, and in his ‘Interim Report’, published in The Cambridge Review LXXVII (21 April 1956), he said that soon after his arrival he had

  discovered that there is something at Cambridge which fills the same place philosophy filled at Oxford: a discipline which overflows the faculty of its birth and percolates through all the others and about which the freshman must pick up something if he means to be anybody. This is Literary Criticism (with the largest possible capitals for both words). You were never safe from the philosopher at Oxford; here, never from the Critic.5

  He certainly knew his own limitations. In October 1956 Professor Basil Willey wrote to him suggesting that he might consider becoming chairman of the Faculty Board of English. Lewis replied firmly on 26 October:

  No. It would never do. People so often deny their own capacity for business either through mock-modesty or through laziness that when the denial happens to be true, it is difficult to make it convincing. But I have been tried at this kind of job; and none of those who experienced me in office ever wanted to repeat the experience. I am both muddlesome and forgetful. Quite objectively, I’d be a disaster. But thank you for your suggestion.6

  Lewis went on in the same letter to suggest Dr F.R. Leavis – ‘the Critic’ – for the position: ‘I know it’s risky: but “malcontents” have before now been tamed by office.’7 With their diametrically opposed opinions on literature and criticism, Lewis and Leavis have often been set up as deadly enemies ready to spring metaphorically at each other’s throats at the first opportunity. Aware of this, Lewis, the last person to bear ill-will on account of a purely literary disagreement, was inclined to treat the supposed hostility as a joke – with the aid of an amusing nightmare about being introduced as ‘Dr Leavis’ when about to give some important lectures. When he became Leavis’s colleague on the English Faculty Board at Cambridge, he described his surprise on meeting him for the first time. ‘I expected to be pounced upon and shaken!’ he said. ‘But instead I found a quiet, charming and kindly man who welcomed me to Cambridge. Usually he sits and says nothing at Faculty Meetings – but if he does start to speak, Heaven help us! No one can stop him!’

  Besides living at The Kilns during vacations and at most weekends, Lewis maintained close ties with Oxford itself. Shortly after vacating his fellowship he was elected an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen, and would often take a friend to lunch in the Senior Common Room there. He had been elected to the same honour at Univ., and had in fact had dining rights and kept up his connection at least until 1947, when he gave up tutoring the relatively few undergraduates reading English at the college. After the war the numbers of students increased to such an extent that Magdalen took up all his time. Hugo Dyson, English tutor at Merton, took over his Univ. pupils until one of Lewis’s last students, Peter Bayley, was elected as the first full-time English tutor at the college. He also continued to have some say in the English faculty at Oxford, since on 12 January 1959 he was attending an Electors’ meeting in the Delegates’ room at the University Registry on choosing a successor to Tolkien for the Merton Chair of English Language and Literature.

  Writing to an American pen-friend, Edward Allen, on 5 December 1955, Lewis said:

  My new college is a smaller, softer, more gracious place than my old. The mental and social atmosphere is like the sunny side of a wall in an old garden. The only danger is lest I grow too comfortable and over-ripe. The town, after Nuffield-ruined and industrialized Oxford, is delightfully small and I can get a real country walk whenever I want. All my friends say I look younger. Oddly enough the week-end journies are no trouble at all. I find myself perfectly content in a slow train that crawls thro’ green fields stopping at every station.8

  That journey on the ‘Cantab Crawler’ soon became a new joy to those closer friends who, after the weekly meeting at the ‘Bird and Baby’ (now held on Monday rather than Tuesday) and a snack lunch, often at the Trout at Godstow, would accompany Lewis to Cambridge for dinner, a long evening of talk, a comfortable night in the guest room across th
e court from his rooms above the Old Library, and a leisurely breakfast ending in time for Lewis’s lecture at 10 a.m. and his guest’s departure.

  At the beginning and end of every term Lewis would ask his driver friend, Clifford Morris, to take him to or from Cambridge by car. Morris remembered:

  If it were in wintertime, we generally found a snug little inn, somewhere on the way, and had a meal there; if it were in the summer, we generally took sandwiches and picnicked where we fancied … Dr Lewis was a great lover of the natural scene, and he was always delighted to be taken through Woburn Park, where the herds of deer and other animals come wandering down to the public highway; and where, in its season, the magnificent rhododendron drive is a sight to behold.9

  The years at Cambridge were mellow years and happy years for Lewis. The junior Fellow at Magdalene enjoyed being a ‘new boy’ whose duty was to wait on the senior Fellows in the Combination Room and pour out the port for them. He took a genuine pleasure in welcoming Oxford friends to his new university and showing them triumphantly what virtues, lost to Oxford, the ‘other place’ had revealed to him.

  Anxious to take as much part as possible in the life of so friendly a college, so welcoming a university, he began even to attend undergraduate theatricals – and found delight not only in the Greek plays, still done in the original, which the Greek Play Committee put on every third year, but in the French Society’s performance of Racine, Corneille and Molière, and even in English Restoration comedies. He was still not converted to the latter; but a production in English of Tartuffe excited him so much that he hastened home to read the French text, and had soon added the complete works of Molière to his literary estate.