by Michael Ward
The next day, 15 July, Lewis went to the hospital for an examination, where he had a heart-attack and went into a coma. The doctors did not expect him to regain consciousness, but to everyone’s surprise Lewis came out of his coma—and asked for his tea!
By the next day he wanted to catch up with his letter writing, and I was with him most of the day over the next two weeks taking dictation and helping in various ways.
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It was during the time he was in the hospital that I became familiar with one of the most surprising things about his private life. I learned of it through answering his correspondence with his friend, Owen Barfield, who also acted as his lawyer. From the time Lewis began making money from his Christian writings, beginning with the serialisation of The Screwtape Letters in 1941, and later the radio talks, which were published as Mere Christianity, Lewis refused to touch a penny of it. Instead he sent the publishers and the BBC a list of widows and orphans and directed that the money be sent to them. Lewis did not understand the difference between gross and net profit, and in the spring of 1942 he discovered to his horror that he owed a hefty tax bill on monies he’d given away. Before things got out of hand, Owen Barfield intervened and helped Lewis set up a charitable trust—called the Agape Fund or “Agapargyry” (charity + silver) as they called it. Thereafter, and until Lewis’s marriage in 1957, Lewis had two-thirds of his income paid into the “Agapargyry” for the supplying of anonymous gifts to various people in need, but especially widows and orphans. I learned of this because of the letters I was writing to Owen Barfield about the ending of the Agapargyry.
Two things flashed across my mind. One was the poorness, almost
the poverty, of the way Lewis lived at The Kilns. When I arrived there I discovered that everyone smoked, but that there was only one ashtray in the house. I had to beg Lewis to allow me to buy several cheap ones to litter about the place to prevent the house catching fire. The new ashtrays went unnoticed. Lewis nearly always flicked his ashes across the rug in his study.
“Ashes are good for rugs,” he said, “but only men believe it!” I learned too that when the new housekeeper, Mrs. Miller, moved to The Kilns in 1952
she found the blackout curtains still up. These coarse black curtains had been necessary during wartime, but the war had long been over, and Mrs Miller asked Lewis if they couldn’t be replaced. He saw no reason to waste money on curtains. In that case, asked Mrs. Miller, would he mind if she washed them? Luckily, in the course of being washed the blackout curtains dissolved into ink, and had to be poured out. The Kilns got new curtains.
In talking with Lewis about the Agape Fund, I realised that he was not altogether comfortable about ending it when he married. But Owen Barfield assured him that it had been necessary. I, for my part, knowing what a plain, almost threadbare, life he lived, was stunned that he had been so extremely generous. “Why,” I asked plainly, “did you give away so much?” The simplic-ity of his answer took my breath away. “God was so good in having me,” he said, “that the least I could do was give away most of what I made in His name.” When was the last time we said, “God was so good in having me”?
When was the last time I said that?
During this enforced rest in the hospital, when Lewis sometimes
needed something to occupy him, I suggested that this would be a good
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time to make any changes he wanted made in his published writings. He agreed, and he mentioned that perhaps he would alter something in Mere Christianity. I had my notebook ready, but a few minutes later he said, “No, I don’t want to change anything.” And that was it. I never discovered what he thought briefly about changing in Mere Christianity, but it can hardly have been important.
Lewis had me move into The Kilns while he was in the hospital, and after he got home we settled down to some of the most interesting weeks of my life. Lewis the champion of reason was still very much in evidence, but I sensed more gentleness in his manner. Lewis usually had a cup of tea or coffee after lunch, and following this I usually left him alone in his study sitting in his easy chair. I suspected that he had a nap when I was out of the room, and one day, before I closed the door behind me I said, “Jack, do you ever take a nap?” “Oh, no!” he exclaimed. “On the other hand,” he went on,
“sometimes a nap takes me!” When you think about it you see how right he was. Get into your pyjamas in the middle of the afternoon, close the curtain, get into bed—and nothing happens. But relax in your easy chair with a good book, and when you wake you realise the nap took you.
At the doctor’s advice, Lewis retired from his Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, and we settled down to a life that seemed to make him happy. Immediately after breakfast, he dictated his letters to me, wanting to have that onerous duty out of the way. He always had me read his letters back to him, commenting that “It’s as important to please the ear as the eye.” We take it for granted that his writing is both beautiful to read and beautiful to hear, but this was hardly a matter of chance. He told me that when he was writing something—nearly always with a nib pen—he
“whispered” the words aloud to himself. Although Warnie helped his brother enormously over the years, typing thousands of letters, Lewis didn’t like the typewriter, and preferred that his letters be in someone’s hand-writing.
Now that Lewis had retired from his Chair in Cambridge, and had a
little unaccustomed leisure, he spent his time writing, meeting his Inkling friends, enjoying a pint in his local, discussing the books he hoped to write, and enjoying his time at The Kilns. If his brother had returned from Ireland he would have been perfectly content.
Following his retirement Lewis sent me over to sort out his belongings in Magdalene College. It was inevitable that I meet one of the College librarians, and when I got home Lewis asked what I thought of him. The librarian had the reputation of being a sensational bore, and I told Lewis the man succeeded in interesting me by the sheer intensity of his boringness. “Yes,”
Lewis admitted, “the man is a great bore. But let us not forget,” he added,
“that Our Lord might well have said, ‘As ye have done it unto one of the least of these my bores you have done it unto me.’”
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By this time it was settled that, as soon as I’d resigned from my job in the States, I’d return to The Kilns to resume my work with Lewis. Meanwhile, he insisted, as he did so often, that I valued his writings too highly.
He was often amused when he saw me scribbling something he said in my little notebook. “I know what the divine joke on you would be,” he said near the end of the summer. “I might utter my last words and you won’t be here to write them down!”
As it turned out, I wasn’t. I was in between classes at the University of Kentucky on 22 November 1963 when a colleague told me President Kennedy had been shot. Later that day we learned that the President was dead.
Horrible as that was, I was still looking forward to joining Lewis in January.
I was just drifting off to sleep in my bed that night when Lewis’s step-son, Douglas, rang to tell me that Jack had died the same hour as President Kennedy.
I was very depressed for a while. But some of Lewis’s friends persuaded me to return to Oxford anyway, and almost as soon as I came to know Lewis’s brother Warnie, he invited me to begin editing his brother’s literary remains. So in a sense I really have been carrying on as Lewis’s secretary these last fifty years. In any event, when I see what has happened to his writing I think we all have reason to be joyful. Over the years since Lewis’s death so many of his works have been discovered, collected, and talked about in such places as this that if you dropped me down onto a desert island with copies of Lewis’s works my life would be almost as rich as it is now.
In conclusion, I hope you will allow me
to make this boast. I have waited fifty years to tell the world that I won an argument with Lewis. Not many can make that claim. Lewis was worried about what his brother would live on when he—C. S. Lewis—died, and this because he was sure that upon his own death his books would stop selling. “No!” I exclaimed. “What d’you mean, ‘no?’” he said. “This happens,” he said, “to nearly all authors. After they die their books sell for a while, and then trail off to nothing.” “But not yours!” I said. “Why not?” he asked. “Because they are too good—and people are not that stupid.”
Well, you see who won that argument. And yet, if Lewis was wrong
about anything, wasn’t this precisely the one thing he ought to have been wrong about? But such was his humility, his attention always turned away from himself. And if Lewis got one thing not only right, but terrifically right, it was his prediction that I would be stuck forever with the phrase even he could not cure me of—“As C. S. Lewis has said.”
Recommended Resources
Principal Works by C. S. Lewis
The Abolition of Man (1943)
The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936) All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922–1927, edited by Walter Hooper (1991)
Boxen, The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper (1985) Christian Reflections, edited by Walter Hooper (1967)
Collected Letters, Volume I, edited by Walter Hooper (2000) Collected Letters, Volume II, edited by Walter Hooper (2004) Collected Letters, Volume III, edited by Walter Hooper (2006) The Collected Poems of C. S. Lewis: A Critical Edition, edited by Don W. King (2015) The Dark Tower and Other Stories, edited by Walter Hooper (1977) The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature (1964) English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954) Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, edited by Lesley Walmsley (2000) Essay Collection: Faith, Christianity and the Church, edited by Lesley Walmsley (2002) An Experiment in Criticism (1961)
The Four Loves (1960)
George MacDonald: An Anthology (1946)
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, edited by Walter Hooper (1970) The Great Divorce: A Dream (1945)
A Grief Observed (1961)
The Horse and His Boy (1954)
Image and Imagination: Essays and Reviews, edited by Walter Hoope (2013) The Last Battle (1956)
Letters, edited with a memoir by W. H. Lewis, revised and expanded edition, edited by Walter Hooper (1988)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950)
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recommended resources
The Magician’s Nephew (1955)
Mere Christianity (1952)
Miracles: A Preliminary Study (revised edition: 1960)
Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories, edited by Walter Hooper (1966) Out of the Silent Planet (1938)
Perelandra (1943)
The Personal Heresy: A Controversy [with E. M. W. Tillyard] (1939) The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933)
Prayer: Letters to Malcolm (1964)
A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942)
Present Concerns: Ethical Essays, edited by Walter Hooper (1986) Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia (1951)
The Problem of Pain (1940)
Reflections on the Psalms (1958)
Rehabilitations and Other Essays (1939)
The Screwtape Letters (1942)
Screwtape Proposes a Toast and other pieces (1965)
Selected Literary Essays, edited by Walter Hooper (1969)
The Silver Chair (1953)
Spenser’s Images of Life, edited by Alastair Fowler (1967) Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, edited by Walter Hooper (1966) Studies in Words (1960)
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945) They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses (1962)
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956)
The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952)
Selected Works about C. S. Lewis
Baggett, David, et al., eds. C. S. Lewis as Philosopher: Truth, Goodness and Beauty Downer Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008.
Barfield, Owen. Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis. Edited by G. B. Tennyson. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989.
Barkman, Adam. C. S. Lewis and Philosophy as a Way of Life: A Comprehensive Historical Examination of his Philosophical Thoughts. Allentown, PA: Zossima, 2009.
Bassham, Gregory, ed. C. S. Lewis’s Christian Apologetics: For and Against. Leiden: Rodopi-Brill, 2015.
Bassham, Gregory, and Jerry L. Walls, eds. The “Chronicles of Narnia” and Philosophy: The Lion, The Witch And The Worldview. Chicago: Open Court, 2005.
Bennett, J. A. W., ed. The Humane Medievalist: An Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965.
Burson, Scott R., and Jerry L. Walls. C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer: Lessons for a New Century from the Most Influential Apologists of Our Time. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 1998.
recommended resources
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Cantor, Norman F. Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 1991.
Carpenter, Humphrey. The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. London: HarperCollins, 2006.
Carnell, Corbin Scott. Bright Shadow of Reality: Spiritual Longing in C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999.
Christensen, Michael. C. S. Lewis On Scripture. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1979.
Como, James T. Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis. Dallas: Spence, 1999.
———, ed. Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005.
Cunningham, Richard B. C. S. Lewis: Defender of the Faith. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1967.
Curtis, Carolyn, and Mary Pomroy Key, eds. Women and C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Lion Hudson, 2015.
Davison, Andrew, ed. Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition. London: SCM, 2011.
Downing, David C. The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis’ Journey to Faith. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2002.
Edwards, Bruce L., ed. C. S. Lewis: Life, Works and Legacy. 4 vols. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007.
———, ed. The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic and Imaginative Writer. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988.
Fowler, Alastair. “C. S. Lewis: Supervisor.” Yale Review 91.4 (2003) 64–80.
Gibb, Jocelyn, ed. Light on C. S. Lewis. London: Bles, 1965.
Glyer, Diana Pavlac. The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007.
Graham, David, ed. We Remember C. S. Lewis: Essays and Memoirs. Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2001.
Green, Roger Lancelyn, and Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Rev. ed. London: HarperCollins, 2002.
Goetz, Stewart. “The Argument from Reason.” Philosophia Christi 15.1 (2013) 47–62.
Harwood, Laurence. C .S. Lewis, My Godfather. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2007.
Heck, Joel D. Irrigating Deserts: C. S. Lewis on Education. St. Louis: Concordia Academic Press, 2005.
Holmer, Paul. C. S. Lewis: The Shape of his Faith and Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1976.
Hooper, Walter. C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works. London: HarperCollins, 1996.
Howard, Thomas. C. S. Lewis, Man of Letters: A Reading of His Fiction. Worthing, UK: Churchman, 1987.
Jacobs, Alan. The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis. London: SPCK, 2005.
Keefe, Carolyn, ed. C. S. Lewis: Speaker and Teacher. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971.
Kort, Wesley. C. S. Lewis: Then and Now. London: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Kree
ft, Peter. Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialogue Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley and C. S. Lewis. Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2008.
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recommended resources
———. C. S. Lewis for the Third Millennium. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1990.
Lucas, J. R. “The Restoration of Man.” Theology 98 (1995) 445–56.
MacSwain, Robert, and Michael Ward, eds. The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
Manlove, C. N. C. S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement. London: Macmillan, 1987.
Martin, Thomas L., ed. Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2000.
Martindale, Wayne. Beyond the Shadowlands: C. S. Lewis on Heaven and Hell. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2005.
Meilaender, Gilbert. The Taste for the Other: The Social and Ethical Thought of C. S.
Lewis. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
McGrath, Alister. C. S. Lewis: A Life. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2013.
———. The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.
Menuge, Angus J. L., ed. C. S. Lewis: Lightbearer in the Shadowlands: The Evangelistic Vision of C. S. Lewis. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1997.
Mills, David, ed. The Pilgrim’s Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998.
Myers, Doris T. Bareface: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s Last Novel. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 2004.
———. C. S. Lewis in Context. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991.
Nicholi, Armand M. Jr. The Question of God: C. S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud Debate God, Love, Sex, and The Meaning Of Life. New York: Free, 2002.
Pike, Mark A. Mere Education: C. S. Lewis as Teacher for our Time. Cambridge: Lutterworth, 2013.
Poe, Harry Lee, and Rebecca Whitten Poe, eds. C. S. Lewis Remembered. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006.
