The wideness of Lewis’s reading must come as a constant surprise to those critics who accuse him of a narrow conservatism and a lamentable ‘squareness’. (When accused of the latter he used to quote, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, the title page of one of his favourite books in the field of minor literature: Flatland – by ‘A Square’.) Seldom indeed did he condemn a writing unread: when he dismissed a writer such as Joyce or Lawrence to a friend of similar tastes as ‘good, I’m sure – but not for us’, he had read Ulysses or Sons and Lovers from cover to cover, and formed his opinion from actual experience. In Combination Room or Senior Common Room he would often make a point of sitting next to the youngest person present and pump him for information on his personal, professional or secular outlook with almost the relentless curiosity and interest of Kipling himself.
Another Fellow, John Walsh, the historian, who later migrated to Oxford, came to Magdalene as a Bye-Fellow in 1952. Lewis, he said,
flowered in Magdalene, which he found a far more congenial – and Christian – home than the more abrasive society of the other Magdalen, which he sharply depicted in That Hideous Strength. For a shy junior don, sitting in the candle-lit half-circle of the Combination Room over coffee and port night after night, keeping one’s conversation end up with Lewis was part ordeal, part delight, and certainly an education. He did not pick arguments, but if he did, he liked to win them; in a debate with him I always felt at the wrong end of a Socratic dialogue. Lewis seemed not only to have read everything but to have remembered it as well; if one quoted – say – an obscure bit of Calvin, as likely as not he would continue or complete the quotation. He was the best-read man I have ever met, almost too well read. In conversation with tired scientists just in from a hard day at the lab he would throw off lines of Euripides, not at all with the intention of displaying his learning, but in the simple, optimistic belief that everyone had ranged across European literature from Homer to Kipling as he had done.10
Other members of Magdalene whom Lewis came to know and like included F.McD.C. Turner, D.W. Babbage, J.F. Burnet, R.W.M. Dias and J.E. Stevens.
There were friends outside Magdalene as well. Lewis had dinner on numerous occasions with a couple he had known since the 1930s – Stanley Bennett and his wife Joan.* Soon there were others whose friendship was a source of great pleasure to Lewis. He relished his friendly disputation with the classicist Nan Dunbar, who at the time was at Girton College and who later became the Classics Tutor at Somerville College, Oxford. They argued about the Latin poet Statius, and became great friends thereby. In his letter to Miss Dunbar of 18 October 1963 he called her ‘the liveliest and learnedest of my daughters’.11
With more leisure than he had enjoyed for years at Oxford, Lewis fell back happily into the ideal day that derived from his routine at Bookham. ‘His normal existence followed an extremely orderly pattern,’ wrote Dr Ladborough:
Early rising, chapel, Communion at least once a week, early breakfast, and then attendance to his huge correspondence which came from all over the world. In Cambridge he had no secretary and answered most of his letters in his own hand. If time allowed he would also write his lectures or books, or else read till lunch time. Then the afternoon walk and tea, and then more work both before and after dinner. That was, I suppose, his ideal programme, but, like most great men, he never seemed to be in a hurry and always had time to see people who wanted to consult him. There were many of these, and often strangers, but they were hardly ever turned away.12
Said Dr Ladborough,
Until his decline in health, Lewis would go for an afternoon walk. He was good with a map and soon he tracked down most of the footpaths in and around Cambridge … He preferred to go for his walks alone, but just occasionally he would allow himself to be conveyed to some special spot by car, for he did not himself drive, and was hopeless with any form of machine. Those of us who were privileged to accompany him on his walks in the countryside were impressed by his intense enjoyment of scenery. I think that he had more feeling for Nature than for man-made objects. He would, for instance, rhapsodize about the ‘skyscapes’ – as he called them – of East Anglia. And at the end of a walk or drive in the country, he liked to drop into a tea-place. Tea was as much a part of his routine as port or beer.13
‘You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me,’ Lewis remarked to Walter Hooper, and the zest for both remained with him to the end. In a more human moment he expressed a wish that when he reached the Next World he might find that Spenser had written another six books of The Faerie Queene for him to read and Rider Haggard the trilogy of romances about the Wandering Jew that he did not live long enough to write.
His enjoyment of getting into a new world and living there for as long as possible gave him easy access to Proust and the Russian novelists, but his personal preference was for romance, either in verse or prose, and to this he remained faithful. Ariosto, whom he reread near the end of his life, he found less enjoyable than his recollections of former readings had led him to expect, but the Arthurian romances and Malory in particular were read again and again with no diminution of delight. Nor had he any inhibitions about new versions of old legends. Although he disliked The Sword in the Stone (1937) and its sequels – considering Mistress Masham’s Repose (1947) to be T.H. White’s one really successful and outstanding fantasy – he was enthusiastic about versions as various as Thomas Love Peacock’s The Misfortunes of Elphin (1820), Charles Williams’s Taliessin through Logres (1938), and even Green’s retelling of King Arthur (1953), which he admired particularly for its overall construction. For although he was never put off by the intertwined or picaresque methods of Ariosto or Cervantes, he rejoiced in a good, complex plot worked out as a whole from start to finish. This he found satisfyingly present in the best of Rider Haggard and in E.R. Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros, and in works of fantasy as divergent as Morris’s The Well at the World’s End and Anstey’s In Brief Authority (1915). On the other hand he took little interest in detective stories, apart from Sherlock Holmes whom he could quote as readily as the best Baker Street Irregular.
But the delight in the heroic and in the more imaginative type of fantasy found glorious vindication in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when it finally appeared after its long years of gestation. ‘The Lord is the book we have all been waiting for,’ he wrote to Christopher Derrick on 2 August 1956. ‘And it shows too, which cheers, that there are thousands “left in Israel” who have not bowed the knee to Leavis.’14
Another delight, which found gratification in The Lord of the Rings, and was perhaps partly responsible for his liking for The Worm Ouroboros, was in the accumulation of high-sounding names, used with such gloriously sonorous effect by Milton: ‘I love ’em,’ he wrote to Green on 29 August 1958. ‘Launcelot and Pelleas and Pellinore, Aragon and Owlswick, Arbol and Tormance, the more the merrier.’15
Besides high-sounding names, Lewis never lost his delight in multiple epithets and heroic language. He would not have it that Eddison or Haggard ever approached ‘Wardour Street English’ or what Stevenson called ‘Tushery’, and was on surer ground defending the archaism in Morris’s prose romances and Butcher and Lang’s translation of the Odyssey and Gilbert Murray’s versions of Euripides.
On the subject of translations of the classics, Lewis gave one of his most provocative lectures to the Annual Conference of the Classical Association at Cambridge on 7 August 1958. ‘In spite of the unlikely hour (immediately after breakfast) the hilarity of Professor C.S. Lewis, in his most mischievous mood, proved irresistible this morning when he delivered to the conference of classical teachers here a withering attack on modern translations of the classics,’ wrote The Times’s Special Correspondent. ‘They apparently spring, he declared, from “a very real hatred” of what most poetry, other than that of relatively recent times, has been.’16
Lewis expressed little sympathy with the new idea that a translation should try to be ‘what the author would have
written if he had lived in our own day’. What reason had we to suppose that Virgil, for instance, would have written anything at all, or got it published if he had? ‘Our age with implacable hostility would have known how to deal with him.’ He found much of the answer to the modern theories of translation in ‘the fact that the cardinal sins today are archaism and poetic diction. I have seen strong young men almost turn pale at the use of an archaism.’ Denying staunchly that ‘poetical language’ was only fit for ‘toffs and cissies’, he pointed out how we still kept archaism and ritual elsewhere in life ‘because there could not be a more obvious way of heightening the effect’. Neither did Lewis subscribe to ‘the theory that translations should try to recreate the impression the originals gave to their contemporaries. In this case we were not dealing with a snark or a boojum, but how could we know what any poem sounded like to its contemporaries? The only safe way was to seek as closely as possible the effect it would give a reader if he was really a tiptop, modern classical scholar’ – which was why he approved of translation by first-class scholars who were also poets, such as Lang and Murray.17
‘The lecture on translation was great fun,’ he wrote to Green on 29 August, ‘though I felt a bit shamefaced on unexpectedly meeting Rieu* a few days later; all the more so when the dear old man behaved like an angel’.18 Unfortunately when Green stayed with him a month later Lewis had lost the script of the lecture, and it has never turned up since.
Modern interpretations of the classical world were, however, welcome: Lewis was an enthusiastic reader of Mary Renault’s The King Must Die (1958) and The Bull from the Sea (1962), and was even more impressed by the former after visiting Knossos in 1960.
Lewis applied these same tests to translations of his own works. One of the most revealing things he wrote about translations of his books occurs in a letter to his publisher, Jock Gibb, of 9 May 1960. The Baptist translator of a Japanese edition of Miracles asked permission to make excisions in the book, and Lewis sent the following instructions to Gibb:
I am afraid I can’t agree to a Japanese version of Miracles with those expurgations. Small though they are, their aim clearly is that I should be disguised as a fundamentalist and a non-smoker. I should be trying to attract a particular public under false pretences. I have hitherto been acceptable to a good many different ‘Denominations’ without such camouflage, and I won’t resort to it now. The Baptist translator may, if he pleases, add notes of his own, warning readers that the book is at these points, in his opinion, pernicious. But he must not remove them.19
It was during his weekends at The Kilns and in the vacations that Lewis kept up with Joy. Despite all that scholarship has been able to uncover, the actual relationship between Lewis and Joy was and remains, as it should be, their own secret. To begin with he had accepted her as a friend. ‘In a profession (like my own) where men and women work side by side, or in the mission field, or among authors and artists, such Friendship is common,’ he wrote in The Four Loves. ‘To be sure, what is offered as Friendship on one side may be mistaken for Eros on the other, with painful and embarrassing results. Or what begins as Friendship in both may become also Eros.’20
It will be remembered that in August 1955 Joy and the boys moved to a house at 10 Old High Street, Headington, a mile or so from The Kilns. They had not been there long when, in the early autumn of 1955, the Home Office refused to renew Joy’s permit to remain in Great Britain, no reason being given. She was in desperate straits, with two boys at school, and only one means to avoid extradition for herself and her sons. In September 1955 Lewis went to Ireland for a holiday with Arthur Greeves, and while there he told Arthur that he was thinking of marrying Joy in a private civil ceremony.
As he explained to Arthur, a registry office marriage ceremony was the only solution to Joy’s problem that he could think of. Such a ‘marriage’ would give Joy and her sons the right to British citizenship. Lewis probably remembered that in 1935 W.H. Auden had ‘married’ Erika, the daughter of Thomas Mann, to give her British nationality when she was a potential victim of Nazi persecution. Lewis did not consider such a solution to the problem a true marriage, and in going through such a ceremony he and Joy would not be unfaithful to the teaching of the Anglican Church. So, while the ceremony could not make them man and wife, it would make it possible for Joy and the children to remain in England. Lewis would remain in his house, and Joy in hers. Lewis did not intend to tell anyone about the matter, but he nevertheless felt that some old friends, such as Arthur, should know what his intentions were should they hear about the civil contract. Arthur obviously questioned Lewis’s judgement, for when Jack wrote to him on 30 October 1955 he said: ‘I don’t feel the point about a “false position.” Everyone whom it concerned would be told. The “reality” would be from my point of view, adultery and therefore mustn’t happen. (An easy resolution when one doesn’t in the least want it!).’21
By April of 1956 it would seem that Lewis and Joy had not been able to find a way of persuading the Home Office to renew Joy’s permission to remain in Britain. Lewis thought it necessary to act. Before that he talked to George Sayer, a Roman Catholic. ‘I raised objections,’ said Sayer:
A civil marriage with Joy could not possibly be a formality, I said, but would, in fact, make him legally responsible for maintaining the boys if Joy were unable to earn enough to do so. And what if Joy wanted to contract a real marriage with someone else? Jack answered that, in the eyes of the church, she could not marry anyone else, since she was already married. I asked if her marriage to Bill had been a Christian marriage. Had she and her husband been baptized? Did they accept the Christian view of marriage? Had Jack told me that Bill had already been married, my case would have been stronger. But he did not agree with my view of marriage, and he contended that the civil marriage would make no difference at all to his relationship with Joy. He liked her and admired her in a number of ways, but he was not in love with her, and this would not be a real marriage.22
Lewis and Joy were ‘married’ in the little registry office at 43 St Giles Street, Oxford, on Monday 23 April 1956. Dr R.E. Havard and Dr Austin Farrer were there as witnesses. This, as two days later he told Green (whom he was now treating as his future biographer), was a pure matter of friendship and expediency. A registry office wedding was simply a legal form and had nothing to do with marriage. He requested his solicitor friend Owen Barfield to draw up a document stating the reasons for which he was entering into the civil contract.
Jack had earlier talked with Warnie about his intentions, and Warnie felt some of the apprehension expressed by George Sayer. In his diary of 5 November 1956, Warnie wrote:
J assured me that Joy would continue to occupy her own house as ‘Mrs Gresham’, and that the marriage was a pure formality designed to give Joy the right to go on living in England: and I saw the uselessness of disabusing him. Joy, whose intentions were obvious from the outset, soon began to press for her rights, pointing out with perfect truth that her reputation was suffering from J’s being in her house every day, often stopping until eleven at night; and all the arrangements had been made for the installation of the family at The Kilns, when disaster overtook us.23
It was important for Lewis to be back in Cambridge by 5 October for the beginning of Michaelmas Term 1956. He was beginning an important course of lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’, which were delivered on Tuesdays and Fridays of every Michaelmas Term from 1956 until 1962.
In Oxford, Joy, who had just turned forty-two, was complaining of pains in her left leg, back and chest. The doctor diagnosed her problem as rheumatism and fibrositis, an inflammation of the tissues surrounding the muscles which causes pain and stiffness. Lewis was in Cambridge when, on the evening of 18 October 1956, Katharine Farrer suddenly knew something was wrong with Joy. ‘I must ring her!’ she said to her husband. She dialled the number. Before it could ring, Joy, in her house in Old High Street, tripped over the telephone wire, bringing the telephone down as she fell to
the floor. The fall caused the femur of her left leg to snap like a twig. But with the pain came Katharine Farrer’s voice, asking if she could help.
Joy was admitted to the Wingfield-Morris Hospital (now the Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre) the next morning. X-rays showed that her left femur, broken when she fell, was almost eaten through by cancer. Further examination revealed a malignant tumour in her left breast, and well as secondary sites in her right leg and shoulder. ‘In the following month’, as George Sayer pointed out, ‘she underwent three operations: The cancerous part of the femur was cut out, and the bone was repaired. The tumour in her breast was cut out, but she was spared a mastectomy. Her ovaries were also removed.24
Although there was still no Eros or romantic love on Lewis’s part, he felt, as he later told Dom Bede Griffiths, a great pity for Joy. He asked everyone for their prayers, and as it seemed certain that Joy was dying he wanted to take her to The Kilns where she could die as his wife. He felt this would be wrong without a Christian marriage, something that was impossible without ecclesiastical approval. Austin Farrer, a witness to the civil ceremony, would have been the obvious priest to be asked to perform such a marriage. Years later Dr Farrer told Walter Hooper, ‘I am very glad Jack did not ask me to marry them. I would have had to turn him down.’ Lewis probably knew this, and did not want to put Farrer into such a difficult position.
On 17 November Lewis went to see Harry Carpenter, the Bishop of Oxford.* By this time Lewis had one particular reason for supposing an ecclesiastic marriage allowable. Since he had talked to Arthur Greeves the year before, he had learned that William Gresham had been legally married before he met Joy. As his first wife was alive at the time of his second legal marriage to Joy, Lewis argued that the latter marriage was therefore invalid. While that is the position of the Catholic Church, the official position of the Anglican Church is that every legal marriage is valid. Humphrey Carpenter, the biographer, and the son of Bishop Carpenter, recalls how his father felt about the matter:
C. S. Lewis Page 48
