Outside the scheduled hours of military training, ordinary undergraduate pursuits filled Lewis’s day. He read classics, bathed in and punted on the Cherwell, browsed the books in the Oxford Union, and peered up with admiration at the fading remnants of the Arthurian frescoes painted on the Union ceiling by Morris, Rossetti, and Burne-Jones. He also enjoyed the company of a second cousin, a young woman with the delightful name of Cherry Robbins, a volunteer at a military hospital in Oxford and an enthusiast for Wagner, Rackham, and northern mythology, who was “a really ripping kind of person—an awfully good sort.”
Meanwhile, little cracks appeared in his carapace of pessimism and materialism. One or two had surfaced earlier, under Kirkpatrick’s tutelage, for even materialism was vulnerable to the Kirkian challenge. “Do you not see, then, that you had no right to have any opinion whatever on the subject?” Having delivered a ponderous lecture to Arthur in an October 1916 letter on the mythological origins of the “Yeshua” cult, he had gone on to admit, “Of course, mind you, I am not laying down as a certainty that there is nothing outside the material world … Anything MAY exist: but until we know that it does, we can’t make any assumptions. The universe is an absolute mystery: man has made many guesses at it, but the answer is yet to seek. Whenever any new light can be got as to such matters, I will be glad to welcome it. In the meantime I am not going to go back to the bondage of believing in any old (& already decaying) superstition.”
Now that he was at Oxford, his intellectual horizons inevitably expanded. The vestiges that remained of Oxford’s fin de siècle aestheticism and the first shoots of its postwar religious revival made a deep impression, suggesting to Lewis, though he remained as argumentative an unbeliever as ever, that there existed attractive alternatives to the antireligious positivism of Kirkpatrick. His new friend Theobald Butler, an Irish nationalist with whom Lewis enjoyed “brekker,” bicycling, nude bathing in Parson’s Pleasure, and comparing notes on the dullness of Anglo-Saxons, turned out when drunk to be quite devout in his own way, falling prostrate on Lewis’s floor and calling upon the Holy Ghost, Venus Aphrodite, and the Holy Mother of God. Butler, a man of catholic literary tastes, suggested also that Lewis might like reading the Marquis de Sade. John Robert Edwards, an “ardent Newmanite” recently converted from atheism, provided additional mental challenge: “He came into my rooms last night, and sat till about 12. We had a long talk about religion, Buddhism, poetry and everything else. How I like talking!” So far, though, it was all talk; Lewis felt no impetus to insert John Henry Newman—or John Keble or Edward Bouverie Pusey—into the week’s diet of reading Walter Scott, Ernest Renan, and Andrew Lang, and gazing at Albrecht Dürer prints; it was exciting enough just to absorb all the conflicting impressions. In early June, before moving to Keble College to join his battalion, he mentioned to Arthur that he had been enjoying a book on psychical research, adding that the observed phenomena “do not actually prove the agency of real spirits—yet.” That “yet,” with its anticipation of future revelations, makes all the difference. Like MacPhee in That Hideous Strength, he was open to the preternatural, but remained deaf to supernatural claims. This could not have been a comfortable position. Those who delight in mythology and fantasy already have one foot in a spiritual cosmos; now the other foot was beginning to slide.
Five days later, Lewis switched quarters to Keble. He passed the next four months rehearsing for war, bivouacking, and digging trenches in the nearby hills. There was still time to read, though, and he delved into the works of Bishop Berkeley, pronouncing him “one of our few philosophers and a very interesting fellow” and absorbing, though not yet embracing, Berkeley’s subjective idealism and belief in an omnipresent, omniscient creative Mind. That he was already beginning to toy with some form of theism is evident from a July 22 letter to his father expressing a longing to read H. G. Wells’s new book God the Invisible King; this was Wells in his wartime religious phase, proposing an experimental nonsectarian utopian creed, rooted in conscience but sans dogma, miracles, priestcraft, or dreams of afterlife.
There was also time, during these curious, unreal months preceding the plunge into the trenches, to get “royally drunk” at a party hosted by his new friend Butler and by E. R. Dodds, an Anglo-Irish classicist and later a celebrated scholar. Neither served in the war, out of sympathy for the Irish nationalist cause; the party celebrated their achievement of first-class degrees, Butler in law and Dodds in Literae Humaniores. During the same period, Lewis also befriended Laurence Bertrand Johnson, a second lieutenant in the Somerset Light Infantry who, like Lewis, held a scholarship to an Oxford college and, unlike Lewis, lived in unwavering obedience to his principles. This came as a revelation: for the first time, Lewis saw that an intellectual interest in aesthetics, metaphysics, and literature might coincide with a daily struggle to be chaste, honest, loyal, and all the rest of the conventional virtues. Johnson was a budding theist as well as a vigorous defender of traditional ideas of beauty and goodness; he would have been an excellent prospect for the Inklings if he had survived the war. He did not.
But of the many friends and acquaintances Lewis made during that period who would die on the French or Palestinian front, there was one who by his death would forever change Lewis’s life.
Sons and Mothers
Edward “Paddy” Moore, by himself, counts little in Lewis’s story. The two were billeted at the same time at Keble and assigned as roommates only because their names fell next to one another on an alphabetical list. Paddy was a handsome Anglo-Irishman, raised near Dublin and in Bristol, unintellectual but friendly. Lewis describes him in letters as a “good fellow” and “very decent.” He would be shipped off to France in October as a rifleman. What mattered, in the long run, was not Paddy but his mother: Janie King (Askins) Moore (1872–1951), known to history as “Mrs. Moore.”
Perhaps fittingly, or at least a piquant irony, for a man who epitomized for decades the inveterate bachelor and whose fictional women reveal, to some readers, an equally inveterate misogyny, the two great mysteries of Lewis’s life revolve around women. We will meet Joy Davidman, his future wife, later. The current problem—and it is one that has bedeviled hordes of Lewis scholars, fans, and despisers—is Mrs. Moore.
She looks, in the rare extant photo, as bland as her name: a mop of light hair crowning plain features. Born in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, the daughter (like Lewis’s mother) of a Church of Ireland clergyman, she became a surrogate parent to her four younger siblings after her mother died in 1890. In 1897 she married Courtenay Edward Moore, a civil engineer in Dublin whose father also had been a clergyman. The marriage fell apart in 1907 (although the couple never divorced), and Mrs. Moore moved with her two children, eight-year-old Paddy and one-year-old Maureen, across the Irish Sea to Bristol, to be near one of her brothers, a physician, and to secure the chance of English schooling for her son; Paddy would receive a public school education at Clifton College.
When Lewis first cast eyes on Mrs. Moore, a few months after meeting Paddy, she was forty-five years old. He took to her immediately, writing to his father in August that he liked her “immensely.” When did liking turn into love? Was it love, or some other uncategorized blend of sexual fascination, longing for a lost mother, and misplaced filial duty? We know that by September 1917, during a month’s leave from his battalion, Lewis chose to forego a long visit with his father to spend two weeks with the Moores in Bristol; he then dashed home to Ireland for six days before heading for South Devon to join his regiment. In a letter to his father, he had telegraphed his plans in a curt sentence or two, as if realizing the enormity of his slight; and indeed his father was deeply wounded by his son’s choice. We know, too, thanks to Paddy’s sister Maureen, that during Lewis’s visit with the Moores, he and Paddy pledged that if one of them died in combat, the other would look after the deceased’s parent.
When—or whether—Lewis commenced an affair with Mrs. Moore remains unclear. At the end of October, he wrote to Art
hur, warning him that all discussion of his relationship with her was henceforth forbidden. That Lewis banned any mention of this subject with his closest friend, who hitherto had received all his sexual confidences, suggests strongly that the romance, if that is the right word, had begun during his September sojourn, if not earlier (he also had visited the Moores for a weekend in August). In any event, one immediate effect of Lewis’s entanglement with Mrs. Moore was to damage further his already rickety relationship with his father. Ordered to the front in early November, Lewis spent his last forty-eight-hour leave in Bristol with her and telegraphed his father to come see him there. Albert, surely livid, replied, “Don’t understand telegram. Please write. P.” Lewis did shoot off an apology of sorts, but the die was cast. All that remained of Albert’s relationship with Lewis crumbled, while Mrs. Moore became, for the rest of her life, Lewis’s companion and (as he himself described her) “mother.”
“Men … Like Half-Crushed Beetles”
On November 17, 1917, Lewis arrived in France. By November 29, his nineteenth birthday, he was sloshing through the trenches at the front near the village of Monchy-le-Preux. His experience of war was typical in its boredom, its miseries, its culminating wounds. In Surprised by Joy, he recalls “the frights, the cold, the smell of H.E., the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass…” and the relentless marching: “I have gone to sleep marching and woken again and found myself marching still. One walked in the trenches in thigh gum boots with water above the knee; one remembers the icy stream welling up inside the boot when you punctured it on concealed barbed wire.” The sight of so many dead bodies reminded him of what it was like, as a child, to see his dead mother and realize that she was absolutely not there.
He read, lounging in mud, rain, and filth, Lavengro (George Borrow’s tale of philology and intrigue among gypsies and priests in the English countryside), Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, Benvenuto Cellini, Algernon Blackwood, Boswell, and most of George Eliot; wrote letters to his father and Arthur; suffered from trench fever; took part in a curious episode in which he inadvertently captured some sixty German soldiers; and in the Battle of Arras, on April 15, 1918, was felled by friendly fire, receiving shrapnel wounds in his chest, left wrist, and left leg. The metal fragments in his chest, deemed harmless to lungs and heart, remained inside him until an operation in July 1944. Lewis’s friend Johnson was killed by the same errant shell, and so was “dear Sergeant Ayres,” who filled his subordinate rank with captivating grace and “turned this ridiculous and painful relation into something beautiful, became to me almost like a father.” “Guns and Good Company” would be the title of his chapter about the war in Surprised by Joy, and it was in this good company of “west country farmers … barristers, and university men” that Lewis had his first experience of fellowship across class lines and of service under a hierarchy that deserved his submission. The tragedy was that, like Tolkien, he lost this fellowship almost as soon as he had tasted it. Of the friends he made while billeted at Keble College, four were dead by the end of March 1918, among them Paddy Moore, reported missing on March 24 and buried in the field south of Péronne.
Superficially, it seems that Lewis, unlike Tolkien, did not reel under the war’s steady blows; or that if he did, it remained one of his many secrets. Certainly, the Battle of Arras did not radicalize him, as it did Siegfried Sassoon. The whole period, he later reported, “shows rarely and faintly in memory. It is too cut off from the rest of my experience and often seems to have happened to someone else,” a response far removed from the eruptive psychoses that threatened many other ex-soldiers. Perhaps it was difficult to assimilate such experiences to the story he would tell, in Surprised by Joy, of his journey from pessimism toward faith. Moreover, he sensed that for those who have never lived through such things, what he endured at the front and in its aftermath was nontransferable.
Nonetheless, the war left its permanent mark. Even before joining his battalion, Lewis had brooded over the prospect of battle. When Warnie came home from leave in July 1915, his description of conditions at the front (“a boy lay asleep on a bank and the mess by his head was his brains”) gave Lewis “ghastly dreams.” Recurring nightmares afflicted him after the war as well. He says nothing of this in Surprised by Joy. Only in his imaginative writings—in poetry, science fiction, and fantasy—did Lewis give war its due. Though he will never be classed with the greatest of the Great War poets, the immature verse he produced during this time shows that he had looked upon the same horrors:
Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread
And all is still; now even this gross line
Drinks in the frosty silences divine
The pale, green moon is riding overhead.
The jaws of a sacked village, stark and grim,
Out on the ridge have swallowed up the sun,
And in one angry streak his blood has run
To left and right along the horizon dim.
There comes a buzzing plane: and now, it seems
Flies straight into the moon. Lo! where he steers
Across the pallid globe and surely nears
In that white land some harbour of dear dreams!
False mocking fancy! Once I too could dream,
Who now can only see with vulgar eye
That he’s no nearer to the moon than I
And she’s a stone that catches the sun’s beam.
It was, as we have seen, an exceptionally literary war, at least for those upper-class and middle-class officers who had been beneficiaries of British higher education; a war, as Paul Fussell describes it, presided over by The Oxford Book of English Verse, the Greek and Roman classics, the whole English literary canon. Lewis was fortunate enough to have the spare time, huddled in his trench bunk or convalescing in military hospitals, not only to read but to call up, as aids to reflection, his most powerful literary memories. Upon hearing for the first time the distant whine of a bullet, he remarked to himself, “This is War. This is what Homer wrote about.” Only thus could he make sense of it all—not by political analysis, not by counting casualties, not by replaying scenes of dismemberment, disease, and death, but by relating what he witnessed to the Iliad, the greatest of all war tales. He lived in books, even while men were dying all around him, not because he was unaware of the catastrophe but because he saw it more clearly in this way; even when his own breath was stopped by an exploding shell, Lewis’s thoughts were calmly analytical: “Here is a man dying.”
In a famous 1915 lecture (“Thoughts for the Times on War and Death”), Freud points out that this detached third-person viewpoint, that of spectator rather than participant, is a common response to the threat of imminent death. By this mechanism, Freud believed, the unconscious reinforces its denial of death. Lewis read Freud’s Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis with interest after the war; but for Lewis, the experience of detachment was better understood philosophically than psychoanalytically, as a taste of the transcendental ego who sees all, knows all, and is immune to death. Later on, when he studied Kant, this experience enabled him to make sense of the “noumenal” self; for he knew by experience what Kant thought could only be known through philosophical inquiry, “that there was a fully conscious ‘I’ whose connections with the ‘me’ of introspection were loose and transitory.”
The Second War
Meanwhile, another war raged throughout the war years and well into the 1920s, a war of ideas, as rival worldviews contended for dominance over Lewis’s mind and heart. His pessimism and materialism were about to give way to a succession of philosophical pictures, each claiming to be complete, none holding its commanding position for very long.
By May 1918, convalescing from his war wounds in Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London, Lewis was able—when not staring out the window at the green hill of Hampstead and the red sunset beyond—to send Arthur an assessment of his curr
ent Weltanschauung. He begins with some Berkeleyan speculation, explaining that when we find a tree beautiful, we are not experiencing the tree in itself, which is a medley of atoms devoid of color and shape; instead, the beauty we enjoy is “something purely spiritual, arising mysteriously out of the relation between me & the tree”—and perhaps out of a relation with the dryad or “indwelling spirit” of the tree. Thus is Warnie’s evocative biscuit-tin garden come home with a vengeance! He then drops the example and states his philosophy baldly: Spirit (which he capitalizes in the neo-Hegelian manner) exists; it is at war with matter; and beauty is its way of calling to the kindred spirit that abides within each of us.
How did this change of mind come about? By what stages did as belligerent a skeptic as Lewis come to accept the existence of Spirit? Surprised by Joy traces the progression with an immediacy that no one can overlook, although perhaps it is too neat. As we saw earlier, Lewis believed that the seed of transformation first sprouted in Warnie’s miniature garden, in the discovery of that sickening, intense longing for something other, which he called Joy. Pursuing this elusive quarry, Lewis soon lost his way; the search for Joy became a scholarly study of the images and words—largely at this time found in the Eddas—that gave rise to it. Realizing this, he sought desperately to rediscover the original experience by recapturing the same “thrill” or “state of mind” (his words) that he had known when gazing at Warnie’s garden, when reading Longfellow on the death of Balder, when discovering the Idea of Autumn in The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin. This proved a dreadful mistake, to which Lewis believes Wordsworth succumbed also, with his lifelong nostalgia for the lost glory of heaven: the mistake of looking for the transcendent in an experience and particularly in the duplication of a previous experience. This leads, Lewis argues, to the spiritual counterpart of autoeroticism, making of religion “a self-caressing luxury.” Rather—and here Lewis makes a claim of delicious subtlety—the longing for Joy is itself Joy; more concretely, that when he recalled with longing a place and time (“a particular hill walk on a morning of white mist”) when he had experienced Joy, he was, in that recollection, experiencing Joy anew, though he knew it not. Joy was not a state; it was an arrow pointing to something beyond all states, something objective yet unobtainable—at least during our earthly existence.
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings Page 10
