All My Road Before Me

by C. S. Lewis

  Lewis rejoined his battalion at Fampoux on 28 February. He was one of those who faced the final German attack on the Western Front, and on 15 April he was wounded at Mount Bernenchon during the Battle of Arras. The casualties were very great, and after he reached the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples he learned that several of his friends had been killed. Jack was still at Etaples when he wrote to his father on 14 May saying: ‘My friend Mrs Moore is in great trouble—Paddy has been missing for over a month and is almost certainly dead. Of all my own particular set at Keble he has been the first to go, and it is pathetic to remember that he at least was always certain that he would come through.’11

  Lewis was transferred to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London on 25 May. From the time he got back to England he began begging his father to come and visit him. Here, again, Warren Lewis’s ‘Memoir’, the best thing ever written about C. S. Lewis, is very helpful. ‘My father was a very peculiar man in some respects,’ he said, ‘in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence.’12 Even so, it is hard to see how Albert Lewis could resist the entreaties of a son just back from such a bloody war. Writing to Mr Lewis on 20 June 1918 Jack said: ‘I know I have often been far from what I should in my relations to you, and have undervalued an affection and a generosity which . . . an experience of “other people’s parents” has shown me in a new light. But, please God, I shall do better in the future. Come and see me. I am homesick, that is the long and the short of it . . . This week Mrs Moore has been up on a visit to her sister who works at the War Office, and we have seen a good deal of each other. I think it some comfort to her to be with someone who was a friend of Paddy’s and is a link with the Oxford days: she has certainly been a very, very good friend to me.’13

  On 25 June Lewis was transferred to a hospital at Clifton, near Bristol, which he had chosen so that he could have the society of Mrs Moore. Again he remained unvisited by his father. In the middle of September it was confirmed that Paddy was dead and when Lewis was moved to Perham Down Camp in Ludgershall, Hampshire, on 4 October Mrs Moore went with him. The last part of Jack’s convalescence was spent at a hospital at Eastbourne, and from there he wrote to his father on 8 December saying: ‘At my suggestion Mrs Moore has come down here and is staying in rooms near the camp, where I hope she will remain until I go on leave.’14

  Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. Jack, however, was given to understand that he would not be given leave before Christmas. Nevertheless, Warnie was able to write in his diary of 27 December: ‘A red letter day. We were sitting in the study about eleven o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jack! He had been demobilized, thank God. Needless to say there were great doings. He is looking pretty fit . . . In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honour of the event: the first time I have ever had champagne at home.’15

  Jack returned to Oxford on 13 January 1919 and took up residence in University College. He was reading the most celebrated of the arts courses at Oxford which is known as Literae Humaniores, or ‘Greats’ to give it its slang name. ‘It was a great return and something to be very thankful for,’ he wrote to his father on 27 January. ‘There is of course already a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before: true, we are only twenty-eight in College, but we do dine in Hall again, the Junior Common Room is no longer swathed in dust sheets, and the old round of lectures, debates, games, and what not is getting under weigh. The reawakening is a little pathetic: at our first J.C.R. Meeting we read the minutes of the last—1914. I don’t know any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.’16

  In 1919 the average cost of living in one of the twenty colleges which made up Oxford University was about £60 a term. (At this time £1 was worth about 5 US dollars.) Lewis’s scholarship from University College was worth £80 a year, but after all his college expenses were paid he was left with about £11 per term. Mr Lewis was giving him £67 per term, as well as paying incidental expenses. Besides this, Mr Lewis worked very hard to get his son a ‘wounds gratuity’ from the army, and Jack received £145 in March 1919 and a further £104 in July. This £234 (excluding the wounds gratuity) would have allowed for some luxury for a man living in College—Albert Lewis was indeed very generous with his son. But as Warnie Lewis observed in his ‘Memoir’: ‘since an allowance calculated to suit a bachelor living in college was by no means enough for a householder, Jack found himself miserably poor.’17

  Of course Lewis’s father and brother didn’t know Jack’s new ‘family’, as he called Mrs Moore and Maureen, had followed him to Oxford. They were living two miles east of the centre of town at the home of Miss Featherstone in 28 Warneford Road—the same house they were in when the Diary opens—and not far from Headington School where Maureen became a day pupil soon after they arrived in Oxford. Jack confided to Arthur Greeves in a letter of 26 January: ‘After breakfast I work (in the library or a lecture-room which are both warm) or attend lectures until 1 o’clock when I bycycle out to Mrs Moore’s. They are installed in our “own hired house” (like St Paul only not daily preaching and teaching). The owner of the house has not yet cleared out and we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room.’18 We don’t know how much money Mrs Moore was receiving from her husband, but it does not seem to have stretched far.

  Jack lived in University College for three terms as he was required to do by the statutes of the University. After that he was allowed to ‘reside and keep term in lodgings situated within three miles of Carfax’—that is, from the centre of town. It is surely proof of their mutual dependency and Lewis’s love of domesticity that he was able to take three first class degrees even while being constantly uprooted. They were all so poor that they were forced to live in a number of vile places. Between 1917 and 1930 they lived in nine different houses.

  Lewis concealed all this from his father. Even before his first term at Oxford had ended, when of course his father expected him home, Jack was setting the pattern for years to come by fabricating some excuse for remaining in Oxford with his new family. ‘I shall be staying up for a week more following [his tutor’s] instructions,’ Jack wrote to his father on 15 March 1919. ‘After that I shall go down to help Mrs Moore with her move at Bristol: she has had to come back to clear out the house. There seems to be considerable difficulty about getting anywhere else. London and Bristol are both hopeless: I have suggested here, but that seems equally impossible.’19 The truth is that ‘the family’ had been in Oxford since January. The same thing was to happen again when Lewis wrote to his father from Somerset on 4 April 1920 saying, ‘I thought it a good opportunity of paying off an engagement with a man who has been asking me for some time to go and “walk” with him.’20 But in his letter to Arthur of 11 April we learn that he was really with the Moores.

  It is hard to say how much Albert Lewis ever knew about Jack’s joint establishment with the Moores. He was certainly aware that Jack was seeing Mrs Moore during his first term back in Oxford and he wrote to Warnie about this. And Warnie, who was in Belgium, said in a letter of 10 May: ‘The Mrs. Moore business is certainly a mystery but I think perhaps you are making too much of it. Have you any idea of the footing on which he is with her? Is she an intellectual? It seems to me preposterous that there can be anything in it. But the whole thing irritates me by its freakishness.’21 Albert replied on 20 May: ‘I confess I do not know what to do or say about Jack’s affair. It worries and depresses me greatly. All I know about the lady is that she is old enough to be his mother—that she is separated from her husband and that she is in poor circumstances. I also know that Jacks has frequently drawn cheques in her favour running up to £10—for what I don’t know. If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill, I should not be so uneasy. Then there is the husband whom I have alw
ays been told is a scoundrel—but the absent are always to blame—some where in the background, who some of these days might try a little amiable black mailing. But outside all these considerations that may be the outcome of a suspicious, police court mind, there is the distraction from work and the folly of the daily letters. Altogether I am uncomfortable.’22 Apart from this there is very little in Albert’s letters to Warnie about Mrs Moore. What I feel it would be a pity to forget about this good man—something Jack and Warnie mentioned often—is that he supported his son through all his undergraduate years and up to his being made a Fellow of Magdalen College.

  More presciently than anyone, Albert Lewis suspected the presence of elements in the liaison that were profoundly unhealthy. A surrogate mother-son relationship is not among these: Jack and Mrs Moore had suffered reciprocal losses, so to speak, and a symbiotic solution to that problem is neither unnatural, nor uncommon, nor morally troublesome. But the rapidity and depth of Jack’s involvement, the initiatives taken by Mrs Moore to assure it, her acquiescence in Jack’s lies and his readiness to lie in the first place—Albert Lewis is the only person with whom we know Jack to have broken faith—together invite such words as ‘affair’, ‘mischief’, and ‘blackmail’, all used by Albert in discussing the liaison.

  The notion of sexual intimacy between the two must be regarded as likely. The sensual young atheist lives with a not unattractive woman, still in early middle age, who is not only available to him but very likely possessed of an agenda of her own: the young man is, as his father points out, fundamentally good-natured and easily manipulated, and the woman—in that society, at that time—would surely benefit from the presence of a man in the household. This combination of motive, means, and opportunity invites, though it does not demand, the conclusion that Janie King Moore and C. S. Lewis were lovers.

  Lewis himself must have implied as much in a conversation with Arthur Greeves during the visit to Belfast in October 1917, and about which he later expressed regret. When he wrote to Arthur on 28 October he said: ‘Since coming back & meeting a certain person I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try & forget my various statements & not to refer to the subject.’23 And taboo it probably remained for the rest of Lewis’s life.

  Thus it is unwise to overinterpret. The nature of their intimacy, its duration, and the circumstances under which it ended are largely unknown to us. What is known is the day-to-day devotion shown by C. S. Lewis to Mrs Moore until her death, after a long mental and physical decline, at the age of 78. Life is more richly textured—or as Lewis would put it, ‘thicker’—than we expect it to be. None of us is either this or that; rather we and all the ‘ordinary’ people we meet and know are many things at once, full of shading and nuance. This story may have begun in self-indulgence, cynicism and sin, but it ended as an enduring exemplum of Christian charity—and of Divine Economy.

  After Albert Lewis died on 25 September 1929, aged 66 years, the family papers were brought to Oxford. Warnie Lewis spent much of the next few years editing those papers as well as his and Jack’s diaries, and in the end they filled eleven bound volumes. After his own diary was in typescript Jack went through it and supplied footnotes where he thought they were needed. Both brothers’ notes have been retained in this edition. Warnie’s magnificent achievement is usually referred to as the Lewis Papers, the original of which is in Wheaton College in Illinois with a copy in the Bodleian Library. The Lewis Papers is the major source of the diary. Another source is a notebook Warren Lewis gave me in 1964 and which contains, amongst other things, the original of Lewis’s diary for the period 27 April 1926—2 March 1927.

  Neither of the brothers were good spellers, and Warnie used to say that he could never remember whether he kept a ‘diary’ or a ‘dairy’. His most characteristic mistake was altering such contractions as ‘can’t’ to ‘ca’nt’. Besides errors such as this in the Lewis Papers, there were others which were the inevitable result of typing several thousand pages with two fingers. Because I could not distinguish between Warnie’s and Jack’s spelling errors I corrected that portion of the diary found only in the Lewis Papers. From 27 April 1926 onwards I have followed C. S. Lewis’s original spelling as found in his notebook.

  Those who have read a typescript version of the diary in the Lewis Papers will have noticed that throughout it Lewis refers to Mrs Moore as ‘D’. I discovered from that portion of the diary in the notebook that the abbreviation Lewis used throughout his diary, and which Warnie Lewis could not reproduce with his typewriter, was the Greek letter ∆ (Delta). I have retained the letter ‘D’ because both brothers had approved the use of it. Jack and Warnie called Mrs Moore ‘Minto’, and I am unable to say whether ∆ has any meaning other than being a useful abbreviation.

  Lewis brought his diary to an end with the entry of 2 March 1927. And although they were not copied into the Lewis Papers, the notebook contains several more pages of diary. Lewis wrote entries for 19–22 January and 2–3 June 1928 in Old English and an entry for 4 June 1928 in Latin. The notebook also contains ‘portraits’ or written descriptions of nine of Lewis’s colleagues at Magdalen College during the time the last portion of his diary was being written. I believe they were meant to accompany the diary and I have included them in an appendix.

  The most significant difference between this book and what is in the Lewis Papers, is that this is a good deal shorter. The whole diary runs, as I’ve said, to over a quarter of a million words and the Lewis Estate and the publishers felt it would be acceptable to more readers if it were cut by about a third. I have tried to do this in such a way that none of Lewis’s main interests—friends, books, domestic life—would be lost. There was a great deal of repetition in the complete diary, and I have mainly cut out some of the many details of domestic chores which I dare say Lewis was happy to forget when they were written down.

  I thank all those who have helped with the editing of this book. I have particular reason to be grateful to Mr Owen Barfield, Miss Nan Dunbar of Somerville College, Mr and Mrs Colin Hardie, Mr George Sayer, Professor James Como and Brother Paul Browne O.S.B. The editing of this book was made especially pleasurable because of the help I received from Miss Lesley Walmsley of Collins Publishers and John Ferrone of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and I thank them both.

  Walter Hooper

  21 August 1990

  Oxford

  THE DIARY

  You stranger, long before your glance can light

  Upon these words, time will have washed away

  The moment when I first took pen to write,

  With all my road before me—yet to-day,

  Here, if at all, we meet . . .

  —C. S. Lewis, Dymer, I, 1

  1922

  At this time Lewis was sharing a house with Mrs Moore and her daughter, Maureen, in 28 Warneford Road, two miles from the centre of Oxford.1 Maureen was a day pupil in Headington School. In 1920 Lewis had taken a First Class Degree in Classical Moderations—Greek and Latin Classical writers. Now he was preparing for his examination (8–14 June) in Literae Humaniores or ‘Greats’—Greek and Latin historians and philosophers. He was hoping to find a Fellowship in one of the Oxford colleges, and for this he would have a better chance with another First. ‘D’ was Mrs Moore.

  Saturday 1 April: I walked to Iffley in the morning and called in at the Askins.2 The Doc has foolishly knocked himself up by walking too far and wd. not come to Headington in the afternoon. He talked about Atlantis, on which there is apparently a plentiful philosophical literature: nobody seems to realise that a Platonic myth is fiction, not legend, and therefore no base for speculation. We also spoke of the Old Testament and anthropology: ridiculous remarks by Mary. A fine day.

  Went to the show at Headington School after tea . . . They did a scene from Nicholas Nickelby wh. was not badly acted and for a moment made me remember the Wynyard terro
rs—a high, but subjective tribute to amateurs.3 They also did Arnold’s Tristram (v. badly) and Yeats’ Land of Heart’s Desire: even school girl acting could not quite spoil its wonderful beauty.

  Sunday 2 April: A beautiful spring day. D busy cutting oranges for marmalade. I sat in my own bedroom by an open window in bright sunshine and started a poem on ‘Dymer’ in rhyme royal. I walked on Shotover in the afternoon, much disturbed by all the boys and girls out for their Sunday walk. In the evening we played bridge—very dull hands all round, and Maureen talking all the time. I read Colonel Repington’s book aloud, which we are enjoying very much.4 Late getting to bed. Still very worried by the non-arrival of D’s pass book.5

  Monday 3 April: Got a letter from home in the morning . . . My father seems in good form. It snowed hard all day: in the afternoon I had good fun shovelling and trying to get the roof clear, as it was sending down sudden drifts in front of the hall door, with a noise like thunder. I worked at Roman history notes all the morning and at Adamson’s chapters on Aristotle after lunch.6 A rather depressing day: in the evening more history and more Repington. Maureen in wonderful spirits.

  Tuesday 4 April: I walked into Oxford and left two poems (‘Misfire’ and the ‘Offa’ one) to be typewritten. Remembering yesterday, I set out in a coat and suffered from heat—the day turning out sunny and beautiful—all the more so for the drifts of snow lying under the hedges etc.

  Worked at Adamson before lunch: I am beginning to get the hang of Aristotle’s theory of eidee. Form and matter are almost the same as actuality and potentiality . . . This leads to Soul as the realisation of organic potentialities: the ‘living body’, a great advance on the old Animism of Body plus Ghost, tho’ seemingly fatal to immortality. Can’t see why nous whd. be on a different footing.