C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Over the next few months Lewis enjoyed the attention of many old friends. Humphrey Havard knew he loved little rides in the country, and on Mondays he and Jim Dundas-Grant collected him and took him to the Lamb and Flag in St Giles for a pint, after which they would go out to the Trout at Godstow for lunch. Lewis managed to get to church on Sundays but his parish priest, Father Ronald Head,* always celebrated the Eucharist at The Kilns on Wednesday mornings. The practice of the Church of England is for the clergyman to take the elements consecrated at the Communion service to the sick person. But Lewis liked hearing the entire Communion service. So before Fr Head arrived, Lewis cleared his desk, which served as an altar on which Holy Communion was celebrated according to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.

  Some of the many who visited him at home were Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood, Roger Lancelyn Green, George Sayer, John Wain, Kenneth Tynan and Christopher Derrick. When not seeing friends, Lewis reread many old favourites including War and Peace and the Orlando Furioso. Just before Christmas he read, and greatly enjoyed, Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island (1955).

  Lewis was not well enough to return to Cambridge for the Lent Term of 1962. Writing to Mary Willis Shelburne on 17 January 1962 about all her problems, he said:

  Alas! Advances in hygiene have made most of us live longer but other things have made old age harsher than it ever was before. It is a pity that the old usually dislike one another. In your position I myself would prefer a ‘Home’ – or almost anything – to solitude. Your view reminds me of a dipsomaniac retired major I once knew who refused the suggestion that he should try A.A. on the ground that ‘it would be full of retired majors’! I am better, but that only means more nearly ripe for a big operation.

  The ‘retired major’ was in fact his beloved Warnie. The tall bookcases in Warnie’s room had profile tops, with deep ‘troughs’ running their length. When the bookcases were moved in 1964, the many leaflets Jack had given Warnie about Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as hundreds of empty half-pint whisky bottles, were discovered in the ‘troughs’.

  Lewis’s stepson, David Gresham, was now eighteen and not doing well at Magdalen College School. He was encouraged by Rabbi M.Y. Young, a master at Carmel College, a Jewish secondary school in Wallingford, to visit a yeshiva – a Jewish traditional academy devoted to the study of rabbinic literature. On 10 April he went up to see the yeshiva at Gateshead in the north of England. A rabbi there advised him to go to a Jewish school in London to finish his A-level examinations before going to a yeshiva. On 15 April he went to London, and after a few months he became a student at the North West London Talmudical College in 961 Finchley Road, where he remained for a year.

  By Easter Term 1962 the doctors had decided that Lewis might never be fit for surgery. He had developed a tolerance for his condition, however, and they saw no reason why he might not be able to carry on indefinitely as a semi-invalid. So, with their blessing, he returned to Cambridge on 24 April, and during Easter Term he resumed his twice-weekly lectures on The Faerie Queene. Over the following months he met with Bishop Chase and Professor D. Winton Thomas several times to discuss the Psalter. When he returned home in July Warnie was already in Drogheda. (‘I drank from 22nd June until 27th August while I was in Ireland,’ Warnie wrote in his diary for 2 January 1963, ‘then was again a teetotaller from 28th August to 31st December, 126 days. So out of 365 days I was T.T. for 298 days. A poor performance compared with 1961.’) Jack hoped to manage a holiday in Ireland, but it was not possible. He wrote to Sister Penelope on 23 June 1962:

  It is kind of you to want to know my plight (by the way, apart from everything else, what a bore the subject of one’s own health is! Like wearisomely enumerating for the police all the contents of a lost handbag). It begins to look as if I shall not be fit for that operation in any reasonable time – doctor’s euphemism for NEVER? – but I’ve apparently developed a ‘tolerance’ for the state of my blood and kidneys and can carry on, on a low diet and strict economy of exertion. So they let me [go] back to Cambridge last term ‘as an experiment’. The experiment, Laus Deo, has proved a wholly unexpected success and I am now very definitely better than I’ve ever been since last June …

  You know I’m on the commission for revising the prayer book Psalter? It has been delightful work, with delightful colleagues, and I’ve learned a lot. We finished our first draft of Psalm 151 a fortnight ago.

  As ever, Lewis found ink ‘the great cure for all human ills’ and he passed a pleasant summer at home. While he wrote most of his letters on the desk in the common room – the one which doubled as an altar – he had another desk in his bedroom upstairs. He could leave his work spread across the top without fear of it being disturbed. It was here that he had for some time been turning his highly respected lectures on the ‘Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Literature’ into a book. He completed it in July. He called the book The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and it was dedicated to one of the friends who had heard those lectures in the 1930s, Roger Lancelyn Green. Besides numerous visitors, Lewis enjoyed a few excursions in and around Oxford. He had seen his old friend, Owen Barfield, a good deal recently, and on 12 July Barfield drove him over to Long Crendon for a visit to Ruth Pitter. This was so successful that on 15 August he invited Miss Pitter to visit him at The Kilns. Times had changed since he gave his wartime broadcasts, and on 11 September the BBC came to The Kilns where they recorded Lewis reading an essay on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.

  These peaceful times were suddenly interrupted. Bill Gresham had been having trouble for some time with cataracts. Having lost the sight in one eye, he was now threatened with total blindness. He discovered, at the same time, that he had cancer of the tongue and throat. On Thursday 13 September he left his home in New Rochelle, New York, and took a room at the Dixie Hotel in New York City. There he took an overdose of sleeping pills, and was found dead the next morning, 14 September. Lewis had now to tell the boys about their father.

  On 8 October Lewis returned to Cambridge to resume his lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’. These were the last of the famous ‘Prolegomena’ lectures he was to give. Tolkien wrote to Jack twice during the term. He continued to regret his marriage to Joy, but he loved Lewis and he invited him to a dinner being given to celebrate the publication of English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (1962), to which Lewis had contributed an article on ‘The Anthropological Approach’. On 20 November 1962, Lewis replied: ‘Dear Tollers – What a nice letter. I also like beer less than I did, tho’ I have retained the taste for general talk. But I shan’t be at the Festschrift dinner. I wear a catheter, live on a low protein diet, and go early to bed. I am, if not a lean, at least a slippered, pantaloon.’

  As they prepared for Christmas at The Kilns, Jack was trying to find a new school for his younger stepson, Douglas. The boy had neither liked nor performed well at Magdalen College School, and Lewis was trying to find a ‘grinder’, or tutor, who could help him pass his General Certificate of Education exams. Lewis turned for help to his godson, Laurence Harwood. He, like Douglas, was more of a ‘doer’ than an academic, and he had landed happily and solidly on his feet working for the National Trust. Writing to Laurence on 14 December 1962, Lewis said:

  Toujours Douglas! It is quite possible that there may be a hiatus of a term before the grinder we have in view can take him, and anything would be better than another term at Magdalen. He himself has suggested a term of practical work on a farm. I wonder could you, thro’ your contacts, find him such a place? (He was born 1945 – good health – lazy only about book-work, otherwise very serviceable.) If there were any choice, the lonelier the place – the further from cinemas, pubs etc – the better. Not that he (in any sinister sense) ‘drinks’: but he is desperately social and time-wasting!

  Tolkien wrote to Lewis again a few days before Christmas. ‘Thanks for your most kind letter,’ Jack replied on
24 December. ‘All my philosophy of history hangs upon a sentence of your own, “Deeds were done which were not wholly in vain.” Is it still possible amid this ghastly racket of “Xmas” to exchange greetings for the Feast of the Nativity? If so, mine, very warm, to both of you.’

  By the middle of January 1963 Lewis had found a place for Douglas at a small private school, Applegarth, in Godalming, Surrey. Jack then had to spend a few days in the Acland, after which he returned to Cambridge. There, on 7 February 1963, he had a visit from the painter, Juliet Pannet. The Illustrated London Times had commissioned her to do a likeness of Lewis in pastels and he agreed to sit for the portrait, which appeared in the issue of 27 July 1963.

  While Lewis was writing Letters to Malcolm the religious world of England was suddenly caught up in what Adrian Hastings in his History of English Christianity called a mood of ‘heady and optimistic novelty’. The radical Bishop of Woolwich, J.A.T. Robinson,* had three years before defended the publication of the unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), claiming that Lawrence, in the adulterous ‘sex relationship’ in the book, was trying ‘to portray this relation as in a real sense something sacred, as in a real sense an act of holy communion’. Now, led by The Observer newspaper, the Bishop of Woolwich was caught up in the biggest ‘media event’ of all time. Nearly a million people bought their copy of The Observer on 17 March 1963 so that they could read a special extract from the Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God in which he stated that if Christianity were to mean anything in the future to more than ‘a tiny religious remnant’, it would have to learn a new language in which ‘the most fundamental categories of our theology – of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself – must go into the melting pot’. He suggested that we are even called to a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in which ‘the God of traditional theology’ must be given up ‘in any form’. Lewis was one of several The Observer asked to comment on the book, and for the issue of 24 March he wrote a piece beginning

  The Bishop of Woolwich will disturb most of us Christian laymen less than he anticipates. We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven. We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time. There is something about this in Gibbon … We have always thought of God as being not only ‘in’ and ‘above’, but also ‘below’ us: as the depth of ground. We can imaginatively speak of our Father ‘in heaven’ yet also of the everlasting arms that are ‘beneath’. We do not understand why the Bishop is so anxious to canonize the one image and forbid the other. We admit his freedom to use which he prefers. We claim our freedom to use both.

  In his History of English Christianity, Hastings commented:

  It is possible that without the almost fortuitous publicity … the book might never have made the national, and indeed international impression that it did. It went through four impressions that March and nearly a million copies were sold within three years. Only the Bible could rival it. English religion of the 1960s will always remain more associated with Honest to God than with any other book … In this, as in several of his other books, John Robinson was with little doubt the most effective writer of popular religious literature since C.S. Lewis, if in many ways Lewis’s opposite. Both were highly persuasive. Lewis was a man for the fifties, suspicious of modernity, unwilling to allow the smallest particle of traditional doctrine to be thrown overboard unexamined. Robinson was a man for the sixties, apparently willing to de-mythologize almost anything of which modernity might conceivably be suspicious.

  One of those who urged Lewis to give further vent to his thoughts on Honest to God was Edward T. Dell, the editor of The Episcopalian magazine in New York. ‘I had rather keep off Bishop Robinson’s book,’ Lewis replied on 22 April. ‘I should find it hard to write of such a man with charity, nor do I want to increase the publicity.’ Mr Dell did not give up. ‘The only solution in such a situation’, he argued in his letter of 25 April, ‘is a fair analysis of what the book says and some sharp and accurate criticism of the ideas … I was remiss in not mentioning an honorarium in my earlier letter. The amount is $200.00.’ Lewis replied on 29 April:

  I could hardly do so now that you have mentioned the fee! What would you yourself think of me if I did? There will be implied answers to some of Robinson’s nonsense in parts of a book on prayer which I’ve just finished, and I can ‘do my bit’ much better that way. A great deal of my utility has depended on my having kept out of all dog-fights between professing schools of ‘Christian’ thought. I’d sooner preserve that abstinence to the end.

  As mentioned before, Lewis had been trying since 1952 to write a book on prayer, but without success. There were things he had long wanted to say about prayer, but he could not find the right form. Defending the clearly defined dogmas of the Church was easy for him, but he could not treat prayer in quite the same way. Sometime during the winter of 1963 he thought of using, once again, the form that had worked so well with The Screwtape Letters. After this the book on prayer – Letters to Malcolm – fairly wrote itself. It was finished in April, and a typescript was sent to his publisher soon afterwards.

  ‘Respect and admire you as I do,’ Jock Gibb wrote on 13 June, ‘this “Letters to Malcolm” … has knocked me flat. Not quite; I can just sit up and shout hurrah, and again, hurrah. It’s the best you’ve done since The Problem of Pain. By Jove, this is something of a present to a publisher!’ When he asked for suggestions in writing a blurb for the book-jacket, Lewis replied on 28 June: ‘I’d like you to make the point that the reader is merely being allowed to listen to two very ordinary laymen discussing the practical and speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them: i.e. the author does not claim to be teaching … Some passages are controversial but this is almost an accident. The wayfaring Christian cannot quite ignore recent Anglican theology when it has been built as a barricade across the high road.’

  Two of the modernists whom Lewis believed to be actively building the barricade were the ‘de-mythologists’, Rudolf Bultmann and the Bishop of Woolwich (or ‘The Bishop of Woolworth’, as Lewis called him). Lewis says to Malcolm in Letter 4,

  Never … let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very lightly, continually murmuring ‘Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou’, the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naïf image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?

  It was very difficult to draw Lewis out on the subject of liturgy, but he made it clear in the first letter that he had little sympathy for those clergymen who have the ‘Liturgical Fidget’ and attempt to lure people to church by ‘incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications and complications of the service’. ‘My whole liturgiological position’, he said, ‘really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity.’ Fortunately for Lewis, his vicar, Fr Head, was also opposed to the ‘Liturgical Fidget’ and it was from him that Lewis learned a great deal about what the modernizing revisers of the Prayer Book were up to.

  After his explicit references to Purgatory in The Great Divorce, a television interviewer asked Lewis if he planned to join the Roman Catholic Church. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘you do believe in Purgatory.’ ‘But not’, answered Lewis, ‘the Romish doctrine!’ He was referring to the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Prayer Book. They date from 1563, and are a set of doctrinal formulae finally accepted by the Anglican Church in its attempt to define its dogmatic position in relation to the controversies of the sixteenth century. Article XXII states: ‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as
of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warrant of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’

  Rather than go on denying the rumours that he was leaving the Anglican for the Catholic Church, Lewis decided to explain his views on Purgatory to Malcolm. In Letter 20 he says:

  Mind you, the Reformers had good reason for throwing doubt on ‘the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory’ as that Romish doctrine had then become … If you turn from Dante’s Purgatorio to the Sixteenth Century you will be appalled by the degradation … The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream. There, if I remember rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer ‘With its darkness to affront that light.’ Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.

  In Cardinal Newman’s Dream, Gerontius and his protecting Angel approach the Throne, while the Angel of Agony who strengthened Christ in Gethsemane prays for him. Then Gerontius, aware of his need for purification before he sees God face to face, begs to be sent to Purgatory:

  Take me away, and in the lowest deep

  There let me be,

  And there in hope the lone night watches keep,

  Told out for me.

  There, motionless and happy in my pain,

  Lone, not forlorn, –

  There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,

  Which ne’er can cease

  To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest

  Of its Sole Peace.

  There will I sing my absent Lord and Love: –

  Take me away,

  That sooner I may rise, and go above,

  And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.