C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  The poem ends with the Angel taking Gerontius to Purgatory, as he had asked. The Angel comforts him with words Lewis found very moving:

  Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,

  Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;

  Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,

  And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.

  ‘Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?’ said Lewis to Malcolm. ‘Would it not break the heart if God said to us,

  ‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so, sir.’ … My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am ‘coming round’, a voice will say, ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be Purgatory.

  Before Lewis went home for the Easter vacation he planned a trip to his native Ireland. As he explained to Arthur, he could no longer carry his own bag, and was bringing Douglas with him. Eventually it was decided that he, Warnie and Douglas would go over on 15 July. ‘Bravo!’ he wrote on 22 March after Arthur had found them rooms. ‘We’re both too old to let our remaining chances slip!’

  Unfortunately, by the time Lewis arrived home from Cambridge on Friday, 7 June, Warnie had anticipated the trip and was already in Ireland. That afternoon Lewis gave tea to a young man, Walter Hooper, from the small tobacco town of Reidsville, North Carolina. Hooper was thirty-two and had been corresponding with Lewis since 1954. He was now teaching English at the University of Kentucky and writing an academic work on Lewis for an American series on English authors. While Lewis had advised him that it was safer to write about ‘the unanswering dead’, he said he would be happy to see him. Hooper remembers the delightful way in which Lewis broke the ice between them:

  I arrived at The Kilns about tea time, a favourite time of the day for Lewis who was a great, even a monumental, tea drinker. I too was a lover of tea, but my intake had never been as gargantuan as his. As soon as we’d finished one pot of tea, Lewis would go to the kitchen and make another, and another. I was quite a shy young Southern American, and after what seemed gallons of it, I asked if I might be shown the ‘bathroom.’ I’d only just arrived in England, and I didn’t know that in most homes the bathroom and the toilet are separate rooms.

  With a touch of mock formality Lewis conducted me to what was really the bathroom – the only thing in it was a bathtub. He flung down several towels, produced several tablets of soap and, before closing the door on me, asked if I had everything I needed for my ‘bath.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ I said with some alarm. By this time I was very uncomfortable, and I finally got up enough nerve to go back in the sitting-room and tell him it wasn’t a ‘bath’ I wanted. Lewis was roaring with laughter, and he said, ‘Now that will break you of those silly American euphemisms. Let’s start again. Where do you want to go?’

  I was catapulted into a far more interesting life than I’d imagined was to be had, and pretty soon we were talking about everything under the sun, Lewis constantly making verbal distinctions, and catching me out on logical points. Its effect was to make me love the man so much that by the time the meeting ended some hours later I foresaw a life ahead of me that would be dull in comparison. Lewis took me to the bus stop, stopping at his local, the Ampleforth Arms, which was just beside it. We’d just finished our pint when the bus arrived. I thanked Lewis for giving me so much of his time. He looked surprised and said ‘You’re not getting away! You’re coming to the Inklings meeting on Monday.’

  The meeting at the Lamb and Flag was a success, and after this they settled into a more or less regular routine of thrice-weekly meetings: Monday at the Lamb and Flag, Thursdays at The Kilns, and Sundays when they went to church together.

  Lewis enjoyed a number of treats during the summer. On 29 June Dr Havard took him to Cirencester to hear the music of Donald Swann’s and David Marsh’s Perelandra. ‘He loved it when he heard it,’ said Donald Swann. ‘It was sung by myself at the piano together with a team of singers who exemplified parts of it. Later he wrote that it moved him to tears and I know it would have been the most wonderful collaboration if we could have reached the point where he fed his ideas to producers and directors.’

  At the beginning of July Lewis was describing himself as ‘pretty well an invalid’. When Hooper went out to The Kilns on Sunday morning, 14 July, he found him in his dressing-gown, looking exceedingly ill. He could hardly sit up, and after asking for tea, he could not hold the cup. The cigarette kept dropping from his fingers. ‘He told me,’ remembers Hooper, ‘that he’d be going into the Acland next day for a blood transfusion, and he asked if I’d stop in England and act as his private secretary, beginning immediately. While I was very worried about him, I was enormously gratified by his offer and of course I accepted.’

  Mary Willis Shelburne, too, was ill at this time and was clamouring for Lewis’s attention. He was now writing to her twice a week. ‘I go into hospital this afternoon,’ he said to her on 15 July. ‘The loss of all mental concentration is what I dislike most. I fell asleep 3 times during your letter and found it very hard to understand! Don’t expect to hear much from me. You might as well expect a Lecture on Hegel from a drunk man.’

  He went to the Acland Nursing Home for a blood transfusion that afternoon, and he was still there at 5 p.m. when he had a heart attack and went into a coma. The doctors informed the Farrers that Lewis was dying, and they got in touch with other friends. At 2 p.m. the next day the Reverend Michael Watts of the Church of St Mary Magdalen gave him extreme unction, the Church’s practice of anointing with oil when the patient is in extremis.

  To everyone’s surprise, Lewis woke from his coma an hour later and asked for his tea. Austin Farrer and Walter Hooper hurried round to the Acland. Hooper found him ‘looking as though he’d woken from a twenty-year sleep’. ‘Noticing our worried looks, he said, “Why do you look so anxious? Is there anything wrong?” “You’ve been asleep for quite a long while. We were concerned about you,” replied Austin. “I do not think,” said Jack vigorously, “that it could be argued that I am a very well man!”’

  The next day Austin Farrer returned to give Lewis the Sacrament, after which Lewis sent Hooper out to buy writing paper and set him down to answer his correspondence. For the first week he was in the Acland the poison from his infected kidney affected his mind and he was sometimes very confused. During that week his visitors included Tolkien and Maureen Blake. In February of 1963 Maureen had inherited, through her father, a baronetcy and an estate in Caithness, Scotland. She had not seen Lewis since this happened, and on the day she visited him in the nursing home he had not recognized anyone. Realizing this, Maureen approached the bed and touched his hand. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘it is Maureen.’ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.’ ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said, ‘how could you remember that?’ ‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘how could I forget a fairy-tale?’

  George Sayer visited Lewis often in the Acland, and remembers that when he saw him on 18 July he

  asked me if I had met Walter Hooper. ‘I’ve engaged him as my secretary,’ he said. ‘I want you to like him. I want all my friends to like him. He is a young American. Very devoted and charming. He is almost too anxious to please, but no fool. Certainly not a fool. I must have someone in the house when I go home. Warnie has deserted me and David and Douglas have gone away. There will be hundreds of letters. I must have a secretary.

  George Sayer and the Farrers made several attempts to contact Warnie, but without success. However, Lewis arranged for Walter to move into The Kilns on 26 July, and when he came home on 6 August, he had not only Walter but a male nurse, Alec Ross, in case he was taken ill during the night. For the next six weeks or so Lewis’
s health seemed steadily to improve. He realized that he would not be able to return to Cambridge and, having resigned his Chair, on 14 August he sent Walter and Douglas to Cambridge to clear his college rooms and sort out his books and papers. Not since 1925 had all his many books and other belongings been in one place, and this meant disposing of many items and rearranging The Kilns.

  Austin and Katharine Farrer later recalled the afternoon in August when they went to The Kilns for tea. While Hooper was out of the room, Mrs Farrer said to Lewis, ‘Jack, Austin and I have always thought you guarded your private life very jealously. Is it uncomfortable having Walter living in your house?’ He answered, ‘But Walter is part of my private life!’

  That autumn Hooper had to return to the United States to teach one final term before rejoining Lewis in January. When he asked Mr Badenoch about Lewis’s condition, Badenoch replied: ‘He’s full of surprises. He could die at any moment, or he could live for years.’ Douglas had to go back to Applegarth, and David, who had now left the North West London Talmudical College, went to New York where he studied at the Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin. But Alec Ross was still there, along with Paxford and Mrs Miller. Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope on 17 September:

  I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma – and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it – but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage and one almost … regrets having the door shut in one’s face. Ought we to honour Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.

  If you die first, and if ‘prison visiting’ is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory.

  It is all rather fun – solemn fun – isn’t it?

  During the autumn Fr Head came twice a week to give Lewis Communion, and he greatly enjoyed the company of friends. Roger Lancelyn Green visited The Kilns on 26 September and recorded in his diary: ‘Jack was very well, to my delight, in spite of his being near death last month [sic] – and we had a marvellous evening of talk.’ ‘My last fear has been taken from me,’ Lewis told Green. ‘I had always been terrified at the thought of going mad: but I was completely mad for a week and never realized it. Indeed, I was happy all the time. And death would have been so easy: I was nearly there – and almost regret having been brought back!’

  Another visitor was Tolkien, who came with his son Fr John Tolkien, a Catholic priest. As Fr Tolkien recalled: ‘We drove over to The Kilns for what turned out to be a very excellent time together for about an hour. I remember the conversation was very much about the Morte d’Arthur and whether trees died.’

  But the flame of the candle was only burning up brightly before sinking for the last time. Lewis had those few extra months in which to put all his affairs in order, arrange for trustees and guardians to look after his brother’s and his stepsons’ affairs after he was gone, and tidy up the loose ends of his literary work. The Discarded Image should have been published that autumn, but there had been some mistake over the printing of it and over its index, and final revised proofs only arrived in October; Letters to Malcolm, though written afterwards, was already in the press.

  He was also well enough to write his last article. He wrote to the editor of the New York Saturday Evening Post on 17 October:

  I’d like to have a try at that article, but must warn you that I may fail … It would be impossible to discuss ‘the right to happiness’ without discussing a formula that is rather sacred to Americans about ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. I’d do so with respect. But I’d have to point out that it can only mean ‘A right to pursue happiness by legitimate means’, i.e. ‘people have a right to do whatever they have a right to do’. Would your public like this?

  The article was written with Lewis’s usual clarity and depth of thought, and despatched to New York, where ‘We Have No “Right to Happiness”’ appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of 21–28 December 1963.

  The St Martin’s summer was drawing to a close even as he wrote. His beloved Warnie – the Archpiggiebotham – returned home at the beginning of October. Warnie picks up the story:

  Early in October, it became apparent to both of us that Jack was facing the onset of death. Yet those last weeks were not unhappy ones. Joy had left us, and once more as in bygone days we had no one but each other to turn to for comfort. The wheel had come full circle. Again we were in the new ‘little end room’, shutting out from our talk the ever present knowledge that the holidays were ending, and a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both.

  Jack faced the prospect bravely and calmly. ‘I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,’ he said one evening. Only once did he show any regret or reluctance: this was when I told him that the morning’s mail included an invitation to deliver the Romanes Lecture.* An expression of sadness passed over his face and for a moment there was silence – then, ‘Send them a very polite refusal,’ he said. It was obvious that he would have wished to end his long academic career by being able to fulfil that engagement worthily.

  Lewis had refused all honours, such as the CBE, at the disposal of any government of whatever political persuasion; but the Honorary Fellow of University and Magdalen Colleges, Oxford, and of Magdalene College, Cambridge, the Honorary D.D. of St Andrews and Honorary D.Litt. of Manchester, Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and holder of the Gollancz Memorial Prize for Literature and the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book of 1956, would indeed have rounded off his career worthily as Romanes Lecturer.

  Even if he himself knew that death was drawing near, Lewis kept the knowledge from his friends, though he did his best to see as many of them as possible, almost as if to say goodbye to each. ‘I am finding retirement full of compensation,’ he wrote to Professor Basil Willey on 22 October. ‘It is lovely to reflect that I am under no obligation to read Rowse on the Sonnets. I have re-read the Iliad instead … I delight to be visited – the sooner, and oftener, the better.’ Dr Ladborough wrote:

  Only a fortnight before his death I received a card from him from Oxford. ‘Have been reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Wow what a book! Come to lunch on Friday (fish) and tell me about it.’ I’m glad to say that I went, and of course it was Jack who told me about it; and not the other way round. But C.S. Lewis reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses when on the point of death! All in all, I don’t think it uncharacteristic. I somehow felt it was the last time we should meet, and when he escorted me, with his usual courtesy, to the door, I think he felt so too. Never was a man better prepared.

  One of Lewis’s typical cards clinching an invitation was sent to Green on 1 November: ‘Good. Dinner-bem-breakfast it is. Fri – Sat. 15–16 Nov, and most welcome you will be. J.’ Green reached The Kilns in time for dinner on 15 November. Lewis had just been correcting the proofs of ‘We Have No “Right to Happiness”’, and was furious that the final paragraph had been altered. He had a call put through to New York, and insisted that it should either be put back as he had written it, or the whole article cancelled.

  After dinner they sat and talked as usual. But he was obviously ill, and kept falling asleep – and for alarming intervals apparently ceasing to breathe at all. For the first time ever the talk flagged; and when Warnie brought in the tea about ten o’clock he seemed worried, and suggested that Jack should go to bed. ‘But I don’t want to go to bed!’ expostulated Jack, waking up suddenly. ‘I want to go on talking with Roger – but I suppose I’d better.’

  Next morning he was up late, but in time to see his last guest off. As he passed the window Green turned to wave goodbye to Lewis who was sitting at his desk just inside. There was something in that last look both of affection and of farewell that told Green he knew it was ‘goodbye’ indeed – and he groped his way down Kiln Lane blinded with tears.

  The following Monday, 18 November, Lewis was better again, and was driven down to the Lamb and Flag for the last time. It so happened that only Colin Hardie
was there: but the talk was as animated as it had ever been. ‘Perhaps the best of all such Mondays,’ said Lewis.

  His last visitor, on 20 November, was Kaye Webb, editor of Puffin Books, in which The Chronicles of Narnia were appearing. ‘We had a nice talk on Wednesday,’ she wrote to Green, who had arranged the meeting. ‘What a very great and dear man. How I wish I’d had a chance to know him well, but how grateful I am that you “introduced” us to each other. He promised to re-edit the books (connect the things that didn’t tie up) and he asked me to come again … It must be nice to know that you helped him to have that lovely holiday in Greece. He talked about it with such warmth.’

  The final picture of Lewis, however, must come from Warnie:

  Friday, 22 November 1963, began no differently from any other day for some weeks past. I looked in on Jack soon after six, got a cheerful ‘I’m all right’ and then went about my domestic tasks. He got up at eight and as usual breakfasted in the kitchen in his dressing-gown, after which he took a preliminary survey of his cross-word puzzle. By the time he was dressed I had his mail ready for him and he sat down in his workroom where he answered four letters with his own hand. For some time past he had been finding great difficulty in keeping awake, and finding him asleep in his chair after lunch, I suggested that he would be more comfortable in bed. He agreed, and went there. At four I took him in his tea and had a few words with him, finding him thick in his speech, very drowsy, but calm and cheerful. It was the last time we ever spoke to each other. At five-thirty I heard a crash in his bedroom, and running in, I found him lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later. The following Friday would have been his sixty-fifth birthday.

  Then Aslan turned to them and said: ‘… you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.