by Michael Ward
I arrived at The Kilns about four o’clock. The house faces uphill, and when I walked round to the front door I saw a man with his back to the window reading. I rang the bell and regretted bitterly that I was bothering Lewis. Never had I seen myself in so unfavourable a light—an ignorant, provincial Tar Heel calling on this great man! But it was too late to flee.
Someone was unlocking the door, and there stood C. S. Lewis.
I don’t know what I expected him to sound like, but I was surprised that his voice was so—English. Reflecting on this later I realise that when we read books, whether written by English, or Irish, or Chinese, we hear the words in our own accent. Thus the surprise that Lewis sounded so English. I admire tall men, and though Lewis was perhaps not very tall as most modern undergraduates, he seemed so to me: he was six feet.
It turned out that I’d arrived at tea time, a favourite time of the day for Lewis who was a great, a monumental tea drinker. “You can’t get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me,” he said one time.4 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 a young Southern American and quite shy at that time, but after what seemed gallons of it, I asked if I might be shown the
“bathroom.” Remember, I’d only just arrived in England, and I did not then 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 re-
ally the bathroom. He flung down several towels, produced several tablets of soap, and before closing the door on me he asked if I had everything 3. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 3, ed. Hooper, 535.
4. Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Hooper, 9.
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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 say that it was not really 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 over again. Where do you want to go?”
There I was, catapulted right 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. I remember a valuable distinction he made that afternoon. I asked which of his books he thought “best,” and his answer was Perelandra. He then asked which I “liked” the most. Thinking we were talking about the same thing, I said, “Well, I agree with you that Perelandra is the best of your books.” “I didn’t ask which you thought ‘best,’” said Lewis,
“but which you like most.” “Oh, in that case,” I said, “the one I like most, and indeed more than any book, is That Hideous Strength.” “Don’t you see the difference?” said Lewis. “You may think one thing better than another, but you might like something else better.” In any event, the effect of all this clear talk was that by the time I had to leave I liked Lewis so much that I foresaw a life ahead of me that would be very dull compared to the few hours I’d just had. I remember to this day how very much I liked Lewis.
Lewis walked with me to the bus stop, with a visit to his local pub, 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.”
As you probably know, the Thursday evening meetings of the Inklings had ended in 1949, but the Tuesday morning meetings continued, with one alteration. After Lewis became a Professor at Cambridge in 1955, he came home for the weekend and went back to Cambridge on Monday afternoon.
For this reason, the Tuesday meetings were changed to Monday morning.
In 1962 they moved the venue from the Bird and Baby across the street to the Lamb and Flag. I’d never witnessed anything like the conversation on that occasion. Lewis by no means did all the talking, or even much of it. He picked up on something I said, and threw it like a ball around the room. The subject was commented on by others, and pretty soon I was saying things that certainly did not represent my usual, muddled way of talking. We all know people who make us feel insecure and around whom we sound like fools. Lewis was the opposite. He brought you out. He encouraged you. You were your best in his company. By the time we’d had our pints and pork pies, and the meeting was ended, I was stunned at what had happened.
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To paraphrase Shakespeare, Lewis was not only “witty in himself,” but the
“cause of wit” in other men.5
Lewis invited me back to The Kilns on Wednesday. He then suggested I come out on Sunday so we could go to Communion together at Holy Trinity Church. After the service that Sunday we returned to The Kilns for breakfast. Lewis enjoyed cooking breakfast, and there was excellent conversation over fried eggs, bacon, sausage, and toast.
After this we settled into a regular routine of thrice-weekly meetings: Monday at the Lamb and Flag, Wednesdays at The Kilns, and Sundays
when we went to church together. I learned from Lewis that his brother, Warnie, was in Ireland. One of his stepsons, Douglas, was at home, and the other whom I soon met, David, was studying at a college in London.
The others who made up the “Kilns family” were Lewis’s house-keeper, Mrs.
Miller, who lived in Kiln Lane, and his gardener and general factotum, Fred Paxford. The latter remains in my memory as a man of immense integrity, completely dedicated to “Mr. Jack” as he called Lewis. Everyone at The Kilns appeared to do as he liked, but at the same time it seemed to work so well. I mentioned this to Lewis who told me that he based St. Anne’s on the Hill in That Hideous Strength on the set-up at The Kilns.
Lewis’s marriage has been, as you know, the subject of a film, Shadowlands. But at the time I found it hard to remember that Lewis had been married, and I said that he didn’t strike me as a marrying man. “That’s because we were together such a short time,” he said, “and besides, I’ve always been a bachelor at heart.” It was, however, indirectly through Joy that I came to understand something important about Lewis—his relish for what he called
“rational opposition.”
One day after the Inklings meeting, Dr. Havard drove the three of us out to The Trout at Godstow. This beautiful fourteenth-century pub was one of Lewis’s favourite places, and while having our sandwiches outside, beside the river, Lewis told me what Joy had said about Southern men—which was that they dominated women. He asked what I had to say about the matter.
I felt trapped. I didn’t agree with Joy, but I was afraid of saying so lest he be offended. I’d been brought up to think that if you didn’t agree with someone’s opinions you didn’t like him, which is absurd. I tried to avoid a straight answer, but Lewis was persistent. “Do you agree with her?” he asked. “Well, no,” I said, “Then, what do you disagree with?” he asked. “Everything,” I finally said, “She was totally wrong.”
While Dr. Havard and I were inside getting more food, I asked if he thought I had offended Lewis. “Good heavens, no!” he said. “He loved his 5. William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act I, scene ii, lines 10–11.
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wife, but he didn’t always agree with her!” I soon came to realise that for Lewis conversation was always about something, that the purpose of it was to argue towards truth. Furthermore, I sensed that this arguing towards truth has been one of the things Lewis enjoyed about Joy, perhaps was one of the main reasons they became friends in the first place.
One of the things that helped me understand the importance Lewis
put upon reason was a story told by his brother. In 1907, Warnie tells us, the Lewis f
amily were preparing for a holiday in France. C. S. Lewis—or Jack as he was called—was about eight years old at the time, and entering his father’s study, where Mr. Lewis was poring over some account books, he flung himself into a chair and observed, “I have a prejudice against the French.”
Mr. Lewis, interrupted in a long addition sum, said irritably, “Why?” Jack, crossing his legs and putting his fingertips together, replied, “If I knew why it wouldn’t be a prejudice.” I don’t know about you, but I’ve never heard a better definition of prejudice than that.
Ever since I’d read Miracles I’d wondered what Lewis’s conversation would be like. It was first and foremost very like his books: not that his conversation sounded “bookish,” but that his books are like his conversation. You know, don’t you, that nearly all Lewis’s works are written in the first person? Even Lewis had to repeat himself occasionally, and I remember him saying several things exactly as they appear in his books.
The best definition of Lewis’s conversation was given by Owen Barfield, who knew Lewis well since they met as undergraduates in 1919. Writing many years later, Barfield said, “Somehow what Lewis thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.”6 I will repeat that: “Somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.” Mr Barfield went on to add: “It was there from the start. It is there is Mere Christianity as it is there in A Preface to Paradise Lost and in Till We Have Faces.”
By this time I’d read almost all Lewis’s published writings, and while I’d find it very difficult to define exactly what I think Owen Barfield meant, I believe I found the same thing. I hadn’t known Lewis long before I realised he was the most converted Christian I’d ever met. The result was that what Lewis believed about everything was not independent of God, but reflected more than anyone I’ve met the will of God. This naturally affected his teaching, for writing to one of his students who had just become a Christian, he said: “One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able so see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out!”7
6. Barfield, Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis, ed. Tennyson, 122.
7. The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Vol. 2, ed. Hooper, 467.
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What amounts to a small apologetic in its own right is Lewis’s comment to the Socratic Club: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else.”8
Lewis’s talk was always about something, always bracing and nearly always humorous. He was always, even in ordinary conversation, arguing towards truth. That was both the terror and the joy of conversation with him. But I loved every minute of it. His arguments were so impersonal, in a very good sense, that I began thinking of the subject under discussion as something visible there on the table in front of us. It wasn’t about Lewis; it wasn’t about you; it was about it— the subject under discussion. Reading his books is a very close approximation to being in Lewis’s company and hearing his talk. But whereas you can stop reading a book, you had to be on your toes all the time with Lewis. Once when I wasn’t sure how to answer a remark of his, I said, “Well, it’s all very interesting.” “What?” he said. “Have we finished that conversation?” “Oh, no!” I said, and back to it we went. As one of Lewis’s Magdalen pupils said to me one time, “Arguing with Lewis was like entering a beauty contest. You had to be prepared to be told, ‘You’re damned ugly.’”
If humour is based on perspective—seeing things in their right proportion and context—then God must have the greatest sense humour of anyone. Lewis was close behind, for, being allowed for a while to see through his eyes, I found myself laughing more than I ever had.
For many of us everything in the Scriptures is more or less settled, and we quit thinking of what the Scriptures contain. For Lewis nothing in the Bible had become trite or dulled by convention. I remember him talking about “poor Lazarus,” who had to die all over again. I wondered who this “poor Lazarus” was. “Is Lazarus a neighbour?” I asked. “No,” said Lewis,
“he was the brother of Mary and Martha.” I blurted out “Oh, you mean the biblical character,” as though Lazarus was not real as you and I are. “Oh I don’t think he knew he was ‘ biblical,’” said Lewis. As it turned out Lewis was writing a poem about Lazarus and he was toying with the notion that, as Lazarus had to die again after Our Lord had brought him back from the grave, he and not St. Stephen should be called the church’s proto-martyr.
Thereafter I saw not only Lazarus but everything recorded in the Gospels in an entirely new light.
I have always loved cats, as did Lewis, and I soon made friends of the two at The Kilns. There was “Snip,” a Siamese that had belonged to Joy and which Lewis called his “step-cat.” The other was Old Tom. He had been a great mouser in his day, but he was old now and had lost his teeth. My heart 8. Lewis , “Is Theology Poetry?” 50.
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almost froze when I heard Lewis’s housekeeper urging Lewis to have Old Tom “put down.” “No,” said Lewis, “Tom is a pensioner now.” After that Tom was put on a pension of fish. He had his housekeeper cook fish several times a week and debone it for the old cat. Once when Lewis and I were walking down the lane we met Old Tom coming our way. As we passed, Lewis lifted his hat. “He’s a pensioner,” he whispered to me.
I don’t remember Lewis ever bringing up any of his books, but if one came up in the course of the conversation he would talk about it. I don’t think Lewis had any opinion of himself or his writings. Of course he was interested in what was in the books or they would never have been written. But he was without conceit. I think if someone, who didn’t know either of us, heard us talking about Lewis’s books he would get the impression that I had the greater knowledge of them. On one occasion I quoted the whole of my favourite poem, Lewis’s “Scazons” published in The Pilgrim’s Regress. He listened very carefully, and when I finished he asked if I’d make him a copy. “But it is your poem!” I explained. “Is it?” he said. “Well, it’s not half bad, is it!”
This should not, perhaps, surprise us for, as I’ve said, Lewis had no opinion of himself, and he more than once said to me, “You think too highly of my books!” “And you,” I would say, “don’t think highly enough of them!”
When Lewis did talk about his books it was because they were of interest to both of us, not because he had written them. I found that he liked the Narnian books almost as much as I did, and for the same reasons. When he discovered that my favourite character was Puddleglum the Marshwiggle in The Silver Chair, he revealed that Puddleglum was modelled on his gardener, Fred Paxford, whom I had come to know well.
I was later to notice many resemblances between Paxford and Puddleglum, but the best was supplied by Lewis. He said it was Joy’s long-time ambi-tion to visit Greece, and in 1960—by which time her cancer had returned—he decided to risk taking her there. They would be accompanied by his friends Roger and June Lancelyn Green. Paxford was always listening to the wireless—or radio—and Lewis said the taxi had arrived to take him and Joy to the airport for the flight to Greece when Paxford came out to wish them well. He put his head in the car window and said, “I was just listening to the wireless, Mr. Jack, and this bloke said an airplane just went down. Everybody killed—burnt beyond recognition. Did you hear that Mr. Jack? ‘Burnt beyond recognition.’” “And on that note,” Lewis said to me, “we flew to Greece!”
Paxford was like Puddleglum in being outwardly very pessimistic, but inwardly very optimistic. Now that Lewis had mentioned the resemblance, I saw it at once. Paxford had been marvellous to me since I first visited The Kilns, and there was nothing he would not do for “Mr. Jack.” Although I never knew him to go to church, he was forever singing hymns, sometimes so loud he had to be quieted down. When I asked if he was marri
ed he gave
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me what I learned was his standard answer to that question. Some of you ladies may not like it, but Paxford always quoted this little poem when he was asked why he didn’t marry:
A little puff of powder,
A little touch of paint,
Makes a woman look
Just like what she ain’t!
By this time it was evident to everyone I knew, and now even C. S.
Lewis, that I could hardly speak without making use of Lewis’s thought, and giving full credit to Lewis with my constant refrain of “As C. S. Lewis has said.” After we’d come to know one another he invited me to call him
“Jack,” and for a while he was almost like two people to me: the author of my favourite books, and Jack Lewis, the friend who would never speak of his own work unless pressed. Talking with him one day and quoting one of his books, I added my usual “As C. S. Lewis has said.” I stopped myself: “Oh, but you are C. S. Lewis!” Thereafter he made it a joke between us, and whenever he wanted anything done, he might say, “As C. S. Lewis has said, ‘I would like a pot of tea.’ As C. S. Lewis has said, ‘ You will go and make it.’ As C. S.
Lewis has said, ‘ I will drink it!’”
While Lewis looked perfectly all right to me, he had been ill for several years with an infected kidney and prostate gland. The surgeon wouldn’t operate on him because his heart was too weak. Now, suddenly, his health began giving him trouble. When I went out to The Kilns on Sunday morning, 14 July, I found him in his dressing gown, looking very ill. He could hardly sit up, and after asking for tea, he could not hold the cup. He told me he was going into the Acland Nursing Home the next day for a blood transfusion, and he asked if I would stop in England and act as his private secretary, beginning immediately. By this time I knew that his beloved brother, Warnie, had been acting as his secretary for years. Warnie, unfortunately, was an alcoholic and this often took him away from home for long periods. He had been in Ireland since April, and Lewis didn’t know when he would be back. He really did need help, and of course I was enormously gratified by this offer. I accepted with the understanding that I’d go back to the States in the autumn to teach another term in my college, after which I’d return in January 1964 to resume my job with him.
