A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  He was obsessed with Latin metres, classical and medieval, and recited the Pervigilium Veneris ‘with harsh resonance and a percussive menace in the refrain that was almost a threat,’ but behind that there were the nursery rhymes and incantations of Carrickfergus, not to speak of ‘Father O’Flynn’ and ‘Paddy, I Hardly Knew You.’ He grew up listening to jazz, blues, and ragtime, the Sitwells, Eliot’s early poems, and to Yeats, who had declared in 1918 that he was discarding magnificence because there was more enterprise in walking naked. Once he could hear his own music, Louis never really let it go:

  The same tunes hang on pegs in the cloakrooms of the mind

  That fitted us ten or twenty or thirty years ago

  On occasions of love or grief.

  Auden, too, cast a long shadow. Louis, having gone up to Merton in 1926, found him already at Oxford. Stallworthy, attentive to what he has been asked to do, points out that, although Louis was impressed by Auden and published in the same magazines, he was never under his spell, and neither of them at this point was interested in politics. It was not until 1932 that Geoffrey Grigson approached both together for the first number of New Verse.

  Graham (now at Lincoln) and Louis were interested in rugby, long-haired dogs, drink, and women, but both of them liked the idea of marriage and children. Even before he had lurched through his Finals, getting a brilliant First, Louis fell fathoms deep in love with a tiny exotic girl, a don’s daughter, Mary, white-skinned but so dark that she was said to have a fine line of hair down the length of her spine. Mary’s mother belonged to the Ezra family, and was dissatisfied, while Louis’s father, soon to be Bishop of Belfast, wrote that ‘the thought of an engagement to a Jewess is dreadful.’ And so, with neither side in favour, the young couple set up house:

  I loved my love with the wings of angels

  Dipped in henna, unearthly red,

  With my office hours, with my flowers and sirens,

  With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.

  This was in Birmingham, where Louis had got a job as a university lecturer in classics under Professor Dodds. After writing his bitter and nostalgic ‘Valediction’ to Ireland, which has infuriated three generations of Irish readers but which Stallworthy gently describes as ‘an exorcism,’ he settled down as a married man in Selly Park. In May 1934, their son Dan was born, and Louis would sit in one of his habitual long silences, contemplating the baby. In September, after several prudent hesitations, T. S. Eliot accepted a volume of poems for Faber. That autumn, they had a long-term guest at Selly Park, a Russian—American, Charles Katzman. In November, Mary ran off with Katzman to London.

  ‘Louis was devastated’—these are strong words from Stallworthy, whose clear narrative always keeps its head. Some of his friends expected a nervous breakdown. Little Dan was looked after by relations and hired help, and before long his father saw him only at intervals. There is no evidence that Louis compared Dan’s childhood with his own.

  He moved back to London to lecture at Bedford College, and with unexpected common sense kept very busy all the time, travelling with Blunt to Spain, with Auden to Iceland, and with Nancy Coldstream to the Western Isles. Being lonely, and since ‘the lady was gone who stood in the way so long,’ he had begun a series of good-natured entanglements with the women whose bright determined faces look out of the book’s many illustrations. Some of his lyrics during the late 1930s, ‘Bagpipe Music’ in particular, give glimpses of chaos, while others—‘Taken for Granted,’ ‘The Brandy Glass,’ ‘Sunday Morning,’ ‘August’—try to fix through recall some golden minute in the past that can never be caged. In ‘The Sunlight on the Garden,’ written, we are told, within weeks of his divorce, he is grateful even for the moments of storm with Mary. This is what he comes back to in the moving Section XIX of Autumn Journal: ‘Thank you, my dear—dear against my judgement.’ The Journal, the best of all his long poems, was, he explained, to be entirely honest. In Spain, he had only noticed what was inefficient, magnificent, smelly, and picturesque; he wouldn’t pretend to have predicted the civil war. In Birmingham, he hadn’t bothered about the unemployed. Now he was not so much opening his poetry up to the world’s concerns as letting them pace beside him, while the ruined idyll is never quite out of earshot.

  When war was declared, Louis was lecturing in America, and came back not very willingly to Britain. Auden had already decided what course to take. Graham, married by now, with a small daughter, was in the RNVR and was called up at once. He joined the corvette Polyanthus, on the Atlantic run. In bad weather, he said, it was like living in a cottage swinging from the end of a piece of string. Louis might well have ended up, like many other classical scholars, at Bletchley, but the BBC, worried that all the available poets were being filched by the Ministry of Information, asked him to write something for them ‘that would contribute to the national morale.’ He accepted, and worked for them for the next twenty-odd years.

  In his preface, Stallworthy acknowledges the help he has had from Barbara Coulton’s admirable study Louis Mac-Neice in the BBC (1980), but he finds it impossible to sum up how far a poet is affected by writing to order. The work seemed like that, and sometimes was like that, in 1941, for example, when after the German invasion of Russia it was thought necessary to salute our new ally with an epic feature on Alexander Nevsky. The radio feature itself was an awkward form, comparable to the silent film. But there were visionaries in the Corporation, brave spirits, who trusted in it absolutely. In the end, Louis’s verdict on his new appointment was that ‘in spite of the unhealth which goes with a machine that is largely propaganda…it has its excitements and (what was less to be expected) its value.’

  In September 1943, HMS Polyanthus was sunk with all hands on the run from Derry to Newfoundland. There were no survivors, and Louis had lost Graham,

  Than whom I do not expect ever again

  To find a more accordant friend, with whom

  I could be silent knowledgeably.

  Stallworthy is unexpectedly hard on this elegy, ‘The Casualty.’ What is the use of comparing it with Lycidas or ‘In Memory of Major Robert Gregory’? Milton and Yeats had reason for their superb detachment, while Louis had a nightmare (the drowned friend who can’t understand that he is too late for the party) to confine into a metre that rocks like the tide with the changing places of the rhymes. In Autumn Sequel, he tried again, with even more control, but less effect. But Stallworthy adds that Graham’s death was a tragic waste of his potential, ‘and it may have seemed to MacNeice that he himself had sold his birthright for a mess of propaganda.’

  ‘But, on the other hand, there is another hand.’ By the time Graham was killed, Louis had made a second marriage, with the singer Hedli Anderson. She understood him very well (or perhaps he had grown easier to understand) and was Bohemian in the right way, breast-feeding their baby daughter in the saloon bar, which was very unusual in the 1940s, and cooking lavishly for unspecified numbers of people. It was perhaps a mistake for the two of them to appear, as they did, on the same concert and cabaret platforms, Louis reading, Hedli singing (often his lyrics) as she had been trained to do in Berlin. In the end, he refused to go on with it, but Stallworthy emphasizes her warmth and animal vitality and must have regretted reaching the (recurrent) entry in his index: ‘relationship deteriorates.’ The marriage lasted, showing increasing signs of wear, until 1960. During these years, the unpractical Louis, who had not even remembered to bring a tent with him to Iceland, became a traveller. The BBC sent him to India, Greece, Egypt, and South Africa, and gave him generous leave of absence to run (though he did not exactly run anything) the British Institute in Athens. It was thought that these new horizons would relieve the poet’s black spells of depression.

  But Louis drank. The advice given at that time in the Staff Training School was to put a discreet ‘d’ by the name of any employee who might give trouble in this way. (There had to be some allowance for genius.) When Dylan Thomas came to London and spent an evening wi
th Louis at the George, their colleagues had to stand by in dismay as one became deafening and the other sank into a sardonic stupor. Drunk or sober, however, the two of them understood each other very well. Thomas had complete trust, as well he might, in Louis’s ear for the sound of words. When he read his ‘Author’s Prologue’ aloud to him and found that Louis couldn’t follow the rhyme scheme (who could?) at first hearing, he was bowed down in dejection.

  In the ‘middle stretch,’ which is hard for poets, and often for biographers, Louis felt that he had lost, not his skill with words but his sense of his own worth. Like wartime London, he had been ‘reborn into an anticlimax.’ Trusting in the power of change, he resigned his full-time job with the BBC, to the relief of those who considered him a dangerous radical, although he had never gone further politically than the visionary ending of Autumn Journal. He moved in with the last of his lovers, Mary Wimbush, and at the age of fifty-three returned to what Robin Skelton called ‘the borderlands between game and ritual, vision and fantasy, fable and history, which are the territory of the poets of the Thirties,’ and which, more than any other discovery, he had shared with Auden. By this time he had weathered the Apocalyptics of the 1940s, the anti-romantics of the 1950s, and the arrival of Ted Hughes. He knew that his enormous production for radio had lost him the attention of serious critics. But his last poems were not intended to be his last.

  He had, as Stallworthy never forgets, unfinished business with his father, who died in 1942, just as he was due for retirement. Frightened of him as a child, at odds with him as he grew up, Louis had come to see him as a great man. ‘Poems would plot the progress of his grieving and reconciliations,’ and this, surely, implies a reconciliation with Ireland, his father’s house.

  He has gone prodigally astray

  Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house

  He could not remember seeing before,

  And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from

  And something told him the way to behave.

  He raised his hand and blessed his home.

  This, of course, was only something Louis still felt he might do; he knew the way to do it. He went back to Ireland pretty frequently—three times, for example, in 1957—without giving any sign of wanting to live there. But in returning to his childhood’s country, his ‘erstwhile,’ he could conjure up his father even in the old seaside ritual of emptying the sand out of his shoes at the end of a summer’s day on the beach. ‘The further off people are sometimes the larger.’ In these memories of Carrickfergus he felt safe, for if he had changed, and even if Ireland had changed, they had not. But there were other experiences that also refused to die. Among these late poems, ‘The Taxis’ has all his old gaiety and his old desolation in an image of total loneliness. The bus passengers in ‘Charon,’ unable to hear the rumours of war through the glass, are all put down in a fog on the Thames Embankment to cross the river as best they can. In his ‘Memoranda,’ Louis reminds the shade of Horace that they are both of them horrible old fellows, but they are at least poets, to whom the commonplace, even the passing traffic, is always being made new.

  In 1963, Louis caught a chill on the Yorkshire moors and developed viral pneumonia, not the worst kind, but it seems that the antibiotics wouldn’t take because of the drinking. He asked the doctors, possibly with surprise, ‘Am I supposed to be dying?’ The ferryman in ‘Charon’ might have given him an answer: ‘If you want to die, you will have to pay for it.’ Louis might well feel that he had already done so.

  Times Literary Supplement, 1995

  The Man from Narnia

  C. S. Lewis: A Biography, by A. N. Wilson

  My copy of The Poetical Works of Spenser once belonged to my mother, who took it with her to Oxford as a student in 1904. On the flyleaf are my own Oxford notes in faded pencil: ‘CSL says forget courtly Spenser dreamy Spenser—think of rustic Spenser English Spenser homely Spenser, kindled lust, worldly muck, bagpipes, goat-milking.’

  It calls up the sight and sound of the lecture room with C. S. Lewis (1898—1963), darkly red-faced and black-gowned, advancing towards the platform—talking already, for he saved time by beginning just inside the door. The place was always crowded, often with a row of nuns at the back. His eye was on all of us: ‘I shall adapt myself to the slowest note-taker among you.’

  Although Lewis, opening his stores of classical and medieval learning, said that he was only telling us what we could very well find out for ourselves, we were truly thankful for what we received. Connoisseurs may have preferred the scarcely audible lectures of the poet Edmund Blunden, given in a much smaller room. But Lewis was the indispensable teacher, about whom all we personally knew was that he was pipe—and beer-loving, lived outside Oxford, and made a ‘thing’ of disliking the twentieth century. When T. S. Eliot came to read ‘The Waste Land’ to the Poetry Society, Lewis was not there.

  As A. N. Wilson says in C. S. Lewis: A Biography, Lewis’s life was never eventful, ‘and yet books about him continue to pour from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic.’ None of them, however, has been as brilliant or as edgily sympathetic as this one.

  Jack (christened Clive Staples) Lewis was the son of an Ulster police court solicitor. He was brought up in a villa in the suburbs of Belfast, where he and his elder brother Warnie escaped from the adults into games of high imagination in the attic. For this Little End Room, as they called it, both of them had a profound nostalgia, characteristic of the period, although it suggests not so much Peter Pan, who wanted to grow up and could not, as Alain-Fournier’s Meaulnes, who did grow up but could not bear to admit it. Neither the house nor the attic would ordinarily be thought of as romantic, but myth is not answerable to reality.

  In 1908 his mother died of cancer; Jack was no more able to accept this than most boys of nine years old. He turned out to be a brilliant scholar, for whom books were not an alternative but an additional life, and in 1921 he was appointed a tutor in English at Magdalen College. (His experiences in the First World War, when he was wounded at the battle of Arras, were, he said, something quite cut off from the rest of his existence.) At Oxford he shared a house with a Mrs Moore, a woman old enough to be his mother—thought indeed by some people to be his mother—who relied on him to help with the housework.

  A ‘mysterious self-imposed slavery’ Warnie called it, for he too had joined the household. Among Jack’s friends at the university (not introduced to Mrs Moore) were the group known as the Inklings, among them the Professor of Anglo-Saxon, J. R. R. Tolkien. Among them they exerted a certain amount of power, and in 1938 they as good as fixed the election for the Professorship of Poetry. A campaign like this showed Lewis in the loud and dominating character that he had adopted for public use. But the Inklings’ favourite subjects of discussion were poetry, metaphor, and the transcendent. It was with their help that Lewis ‘passed on,’ in his own words, ‘from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ.’

  A new readiness to write seemed to be released, and during the Second World War Lewis became, through his books and through radio, one of the most popular and reassuring of apologists for the Christian faith. In the 1950s he began to publish his children’s stories, which themselves were Christian allegories. Letters reached him from all over the world, and to all of them he gave a written reply. In 1952 one of his correspondents arrived in England—Joy Davidman from Chicago, separated from her husband and with two growing boys. She and Jack fell in love, and, somewhat to the dismay of his friends, they married. But she had already developed cancer, and in 1960 it killed her. (These closing months have been mythologized in Bill Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, which is running at the moment in London.) Mr Wilson’s business, however, is with reality, which, as he boldly says in his preface, is ‘more interesting than fantasy.’ No one, surely, could be better qualified for the job. Mr Wilson, whose previous books include a biography of Tolstoy, knows Oxford very well indeed, and has not been daunted by the huge quantity of material
—letters, papers, diaries, an eleven-volume history of the family by Warnie. He can give a proper estimate, and does give a very high one, of Lewis’s work on medieval and Renaissance literature. Curious domestic situations and bizarre characters call out his keen sense of comedy, which he keeps just under control.

  On the other hand, he has a very real understanding of the difficulties of the spiritual life. What does he make of CSL? A biographer has chosen to be one of God’s spies, even if his subject makes it difficult for him. Although Tolkien truly said that, at heart, Lewis was always writing about himself, he was shy of his emotions and adept at self-concealment, particularly perhaps in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He argued, too, in ‘The Personal Heresy,’ that a writer’s character should not be deduced from his books. But Mr Wilson (who never met Lewis) has, with great skill, conjured up a true image. The heavy, red-faced reactionary is there, but Lewis is also shown as a private man of exceptional generosity and humility. Perhaps, indeed, he was a great man. But, in spite of his energy, Mr Wilson sees him as curiously passive, as if waiting for his life’s turning points to arrive.

  Lewis was by temperament and belief a Romantic and, like Wordsworth, he seems to have had his decisions made for him by particular significant moments. Among these were the morning when he was told his mother was dead; the night when, walking and talking with his friends in the starlit college garden, it came to him that the Gospels were not different in kind from other storytelling, except that they were told by God as truth, with human history as material; the debate in 1948 at Oxford’s Socratic Club, when his theological arguments were demolished by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. (After that he wrote no more apologetics for ten years. The defeat, Mr Wilson thinks, ‘stung’ Lewis back into ‘the world which with the deepest part of himself he never left, that of childhood reading.’ He pushed open the door of the wardrobe and began to tell the story of Narnia, the world on the other side of the wardrobe, which is redeemed by ‘a great lion called Aslan.’) Lastly, there was the death of Joy. ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear’ is the first sentence of A Grief Observed, the most touching and immediate of all Lewis’s books, the record of his own bereavement. His own death came three years later.