C. S. Lewis Read online

  Poverty only increased Mrs Moore’s obsession with domestic chores. She was not a lazy woman. She was persistent in trying to do unnecessary tasks, thereby forcing Jack, out of guilt, to do them himself. This domestic obsession continued even when paid help was available. For example, when they had engaged a woman to help with cleaning and polishing, Jack came home to find that Mrs Moore and the woman were both polishing an upstairs wardrobe. When he came downstairs and tried to concentrate on his work, he heard ‘an awful crash’ and rushed up to see what had happened. Mrs Moore had somehow or other managed to pull down the wardrobe on top of her. When it had been set to rights she still insisted that she must go on polishing it:

  After tea she went on again and said I could not help: finally she came down quite breathless and exhausted. This put me into such a rage against poverty and fear and all the infernal net I seemed to be in that I went out and mowed the lawn and cursed all the gods for half an hour. After that (and it was about as far down as I have got yet) I had to help with rolling linoleums and by the time we got to supper a little before ten, I was tired and sane again.3

  It was to escape this ‘net’ that Lewis looked for a fellowship and financial independence from his father. In his final term of Greats he had an interview with the Master of Univ who recommended him to stay on for an extra year and take a degree in English Literature. This would mean that, while he pursued his career as a philosopher, he could offer teaching in the expanding English School. Accordingly, in the academic year 1922–23, he laid aside his classical and philosophical texts and concentrated on those books which had always been the consuming passion of his leisure hours – Layamon’s Brut, Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth.

  He also had his first taste of the men and women who were to be his colleagues for half a lifetime in the English Faculty: Professor H. C. Wyld, who had been taught to pronounce ‘Oxford English’ by a sister of Dr Pusey and whose lectures on the history of the language took a wildly aggressive tone with his audience – ‘You’re the sort of people who would say waist-coat’;* and Percy Simpson, whose overpowering halitosis distracted his students’ attention from the finer points of textual criticism.4

  ‘English’ as an academic discipline was still in its infancy. In Oxford, it was regarded with some suspicion, at least until the middle years of this century. It is symptomatic of the way in which the subject was regarded that not until 1953 was a Professor of English appointed at Oxford who had read English Literature as a first undergraduate degree. Until that point, nearly all the English dons had themselves read History, Classics or some such obviously meaty subject. The feeling abroad was that English was not really a man’s subject – more suitable for girls. It was too nebulous in its intellectual range. Criticism as a pseudo-science had scarcely begun and when it did so, in other universities, it was not welcomed at Oxford. English Literature was studied there, in Lewis’s time as an undergraduate, from a relentlessly philological and historical point of view.

  He revelled in this. He loved learning Old English with Miss Wardale of St Hugh’s College, author of an Old English grammar. He enjoyed taking all his favourite authors in chronological order and seeing how they fitted in with their historical background and times. And his own career is not a bad justification for the study of English as a university discipline. Without it, Lewis would not have been the man he became. It gave him a little push in the direction of becoming himself, the true self who would one day write the books which made him so popular. Classical Mods had confirmed his knowledge of and love for the great texts of Rome and Greece which were always to form so large a part of the furniture of Lewis’s mind. Greats had sharpened his wits to the point where he thought not only that he was a philosopher, but that life and its problems could be adequately explained by purely cerebral means. English was to restore to him with inescapable force the message which he had been hearing haphazardly but forcibly ever since he became addicted to reading as a small child in Northern Ireland. This was the knowledge that human life is best understood by the exercise not only of the wit, but also of the imagination; that poets and moral essayists and novelists, with their rounded sense of human experience, have perhaps more to teach us than logicians; that while no academic, and indeed no individual pursuing the truth, can dare to discard the rigour of logic, this is no more than an instrument. Lewis had felt the truth of this when he read Squirrel Nutkin and had the feeling of autumn-ness tugging at his heart; when the grand romance of Northernness had captured him through Wagner; when Phantastes had awakened in him thoughts too deep for tears; and when the great English poets had provided him with food which was more than just simple ‘entertainment’. Reading English, in other words, compelled Lewis to come to grips with something much more fundamental than mere examination answers on the history of literature. It confronted him with questions which would not go away about the nature of Man, questions which infuriatingly formed themselves into religious shapes.

  I was deeply moved by the Dream of the Rood; more deeply still by Langland; intoxicated (for a time) by Donne; deeply and lastingly satisfied by Thomas Browne. But the most alarming of all was George Herbert. Here was a man who seemed to me to excel all the authors I had read in conveying the very quality of life as we actually live it from moment to moment; but the wretched fellow, instead of doing it all directly, insisted on meditating it through what I would still have called ‘the Christian mythology’. On the other hand, most of the authors who might be claimed as precursors of modern enlightenment seemed to me very small beer and bored me cruelly. I thought Bacon (to speak frankly) a solemn pretentious ass, yawned my way through the Restoration Comedy, and having manfully struggled on to the last line of Don Juan wrote on the end leaf ‘Never again.’ The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics and a good many of them were tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland’s great line in the Chanson –

  Christians are wrong but all the rest are bores.5

  It is odd to find Byron boring, but chacun à son goût. Even if one finds him uncongenial, it is hard to feel that ‘bore’ is quite the right word to describe the poet of Don Juan, or, come to that, other non-Christian writers such as Gibbon, Hume or Hazlitt. The vigour of the sentiment, as so often in Lewis, disguises the unfairness of the argument. Until the mid-eighteenth century, most writers in the English language were Christians. It is no more surprising that the author of The Dream of the Rood, or Edmund Spenser, or George Herbert were Christians than it is surprising that the best Arab poets have happened to be Moslems. Had Lewis chosen to bring literary history up to date, into an era with an intellectual climate in which serious-minded people might not be Christians, he might have seen how flimsy his argument was. He himself, for example, had enjoyed the works of Virginia Woolf. Is she a ‘bore’ compared with a Christian writer like, say, Sheila Kaye-Smith? Is James Joyce an inherently more boring writer than his believing contemporaries? Once we have framed that question, we prepare ourselves for a strange lack of development in Lewis’s reading tastes. His fascination with what he deemed to be Christian literature provided him with a good excuse for taking no apparent cognizance of the fact that a profound change had taken place, during his generation, in the human consciousness, and in Western art and literature. The development which is loosely termed ‘modernism’, reflected in the poetry of Pound and Eliot, the novels of Joyce, was something which, however uncongenial Lewis might have found it, surely deserved his attention as a literary historian. In most of his writing about literature, however, and in all his teaching, he appears to have chosen to turn a blind eye to these authors, justifying his ignorance of the ‘moderns’ in ideological, rather than aesthetic, terms.

  No doubt this rooted conservatism had something to do with his uncontrollable nostalgia for childhood and his longing, at some unconscious level, to be back in the Littl
e End Room. In latter days, he made rather a ‘thing’ of preferring children’s books to grown-up literature. At the time, the stirrings caused in his heart by the old Christian authors were matched by the curious fact that not only in his reading, but also among his friends, he found it true that ‘the rest’ were bores, and the Christians were those who most engaged his imagination.

  The friendships he had made with fellow-undergraduates at Univ while he was reading Greats were none of them particularly deep or long-lasting. It was surely symptomatic of the distance he kept that he did not learn his nickname in College until he had been there nearly four years. ‘Coming back to College I heard with interest what is I suppose my nickname. Several Univ. people whom I don’t know passed me. One of them, noticing my blazer, must have asked another who I was, for I heard him answer, “Heavy Lewis”.’6 The anecdote reveals not only that he was a stranger to them, but that their identity was not of the smallest interest to him. With the friends he made when he began to study English literature it was quite otherwise.

  It is by no means the case that he fell in with a crowd who were specifically religious or ‘holy’. He was, however, among a group of men, mainly of his own age, who had been through the war and who were led, by their study of literature, into a consideration of wider matters of concern than paper-logic. Professor George Gordon presided over a group which met regularly at Exeter College, and to which Lewis attached himself. It included F. W. Bateson, Nevill Coghill and others. A good example of the tenor of the discussions was an evening on 1 June 1923, when a student called Strick, whom Lewis had never esteemed very highly, read a paper of amazing excellence on tragedy. ‘It was more on life than on letters,’ Lewis recorded. Considerations of the theory of tragedy, as expressed in the writings of critics like Bosanquet and Bradley, gradually passed, in the course of the evening, to talk of Masefield, and ‘then to war reminiscences between Gordon, Strick, Coghill and me’.7

  Nevill Coghill, like Lewis, was an Irishman. He was strikingly handsome, and rather well born, coming from an ascendancy family in County Cork. The first time he met Lewis, he asked him if he were Catholic, ‘which made me suspect that he might be one himself’.8 The question had more edge to it than Lewis at first supposed, since Coghill, as a ‘Protestant’ in the South which, even as they spoke, was turning itself into a republic, had suffered violent experiences of the ‘troubles’ at first hand. His house in County Cork had been invaded by a Republican mob who dragged him outside and threatened him with lynching. They had let him go, only to call him back again, and put him in front of a firing squad of revolvers. Then he was released. It was, he said, more terrifying than anything which had happened to him during the war.9

  Coghill, though not a Catholic in the Irish sense of the term – that is, a member of the Roman Church – was nevertheless a believer in the Catholic creeds enshrined in the prayer book of the Church of Ireland. It was a shock to Lewis to find a man who was so urbane and so charming, yet who shared with Arthur Greeves and Owen Barfield the mental quirk of believing in another world. On one occasion, he said to Lewis that he thought that William Blake was ‘really inspired’. When he went on to say, ‘in the same sense as Joan of Arc’, Lewis found himself saying, ‘I agree, in exactly the same sense.’ Then, realizing that they had entered dangerous waters, the logician in Lewis added, ‘But we may mean different things.’ Coghill immediately replied, ‘If you are a materialist.’ Lewis apologized for quibbling but wanted to say that it depended what was meant by ‘materialistic’. It did indeed. It depended much more than Lewis at that juncture could imagine.

  Coghill was not a logician, but he was in many ways more grown-up than Lewis. He remembered the boyish enthusiasm with which Lewis took up the study of Old English and how once, when the two of them were out on a walk in the country, Lewis’s passion for The Battle of Maldon had led him to declaim the climactic speech of the poem, that of Byrhtnoth, leader of the doomed Saxon warriors who held the causeway against the onslaught of Vikings:

  Hige sceal Þe heardra, heorte Þe cenre

  Mod sceal Þe mare, Þe ure maegen lytlaÞ!

  (Will shall be tougher, heart braver, courage the more as our strength grows less.)

  On another occasion, Coghill said that Mozart had remained like a boy of six all his life. Lewis’s disarmingly revealing response was that he thought nothing could be more delightful. ‘He replied (and quite right) that he could imagine many things more delightful.’10

  Gordon’s discussion group, Coghill’s friendship and the stimulation of the English course were the positive features of that year. Equally forceful in the formation of Lewis’s future character were the darker sides of life. Strick, the man who had read the brilliant essay on Tragedy, entered into a tragedy of his own; unable to shake off the memories of the trenches, he had a nervous breakdown. Much nearer home, Mrs Moore’s brother, Dr Askins, was descending into insanity. Askins had brought his family to live at Iffley, a village just outside Oxford. While the Lewises were worrying about Jack throwing himself away on an unknown married woman who might – for all they knew – be a blackmailer, it is possible that the Askinses were worried that the impulsive, passionate, warm-hearted Janie was unsuitably involved with a young man. As it turned out, Dr Askins – ‘the Doc’ as Lewis always called him – was a highly congenial man, and Lewis often liked to walk down to Iffley to see him. By now, some of Lewis’s friends – Barfield, Greeves – had been introduced to the Moores and the Askinses and formed part of the same circle.

  What none of them – least of all Mrs Moore – knew about the Doc was that he had contracted syphilis during his own student days; and by 1923 the disease had got to his brain. Afterwards, when his diary came to be transcribed by Warnie into the Lewis Papers, Jack maintained that the idea of Doc’s syphilis had been a mere delusion.11 It was felt to be real at the time. One day in February 1923, the Doc lunched with Lewis and Mrs Moore in Headington. Lewis then accompanied the Doc back to Iffley on foot. As they walked along, they discussed the afterlife, and it became apparent that this was no ‘ordinary’ discussion of the kind which Lewis might have had with Barfield or Coghill. The Doc was convinced that he was going to hell. Demons were saying things inside his head, horrible blasphemies and obscenities which were causing him torment. ‘He was walking very stiffly.’12 Three days later Mrs Moore summoned her doctor, who examined Aslans and pronounced him doomed, incurably, to ‘lunacy and death’. That night, the Doc had a bad fit – ‘Rolling on the floor and shrieking that he was damned for ever and ever. Screams and grimaces unforgettable.’ Dr Hichens returned, and Lewis had to hold Askins on the floor, dripping with sweat, while chloroform was administered. ‘He’d got as strong as a horse. He was ages going over: and kept on imploring us not to shorten his last moments and send him to Hell sooner than need be.’ It was in these circumstances that Lewis was trying to prepare essays on The Owl and the Nightingale for Miss Wardale and on Elizabethan literature for his other English tutor, F. P. Wilson. ‘For painfulness I think this beats anything I’ve seen in my life.’ With the Doc and his wife [?] Mary in the house, Lewis was now obliged to rest on the sofa. His own bed was being slept in by ‘Rob’, the Doc’s son. To use the word ‘sleep’ for those weeks would be to distort language. He hardly slept at all, for all the noise and worry, and almost the only moments of true repose which he enjoyed were when he was able to slip into Mrs Moore’s bed after she had ‘just vacated it’ for the afternoon. For reasons which now seem obscure, they were not able to find an appropriate asylum for the Doc for over two weeks, and there were intense worries about his pension coming through. Eventually, a mental hospital was found in Henley, and Lewis and Rob drove the Doc over there on 12 March 1923. When he got home, Jack found Mrs Moore completely exhausted. Mary – dubbed the She-Wolf by Lewis – said that she wanted to buy Lewis a present in recognition for all his kindness. ‘I had thought it was not in her power to annoy me more, but this was the last straw.’ He stomped out of the
house and bought himself a large whisky and soda.13

  Lewis felt himself changed by the Doc experience. The Doc had been, in the loose sense of the term, a Romantic, a man who had appealed to the side of Lewis’s nature which loved Wagner, as well as to the side which liked to hear Barfield or Yeats speak of the occult. The Doc, in his time, had been interested in spiritualism, theosophy, yoga. Now, ‘I thought I had seen a warning. It was to this, this raving on the floor, that all romantic longings and unearthly speculations led a man in the end … Safety first, thought I: the beaten track, the approved road, the centre of the road, the lights on … For some months after that nightmare fortnight, the words “ordinary” and “humdrum” summed up everything that appeared to me most desirable.’14

  If the humdrum and the ordinary were what he craved, Mrs Moore was more than capable of supplying his wants. The diary which he kept during his final undergraduate year is a catalogue of tedious chores, performed in the intervals of working on his English literature essays, or on his own poetry. ‘After lunch I sat down to work on Dymer,’ is a typical entry. ‘I had just started in high hopes when I was called upstairs to help in fixing up the curtains in D’s rooms which, having been fixed with rawlplugs, come down in an avalanche about once a week.’

  Mrs Moore is always referred to as ‘D’ in the diary and no one living appears to know why. Jack’s mother was sometimes called Doli by his father; it is possible that the son called his adopted mother by the same endearment. Friday, 27 April 1923 saw Jack working on Old English until the moment when he was required to carry an old cast-iron wringer, a miniature mangle, into the centre of Oxford by bus, with the instruction to see if it could be exchanged in a certain shop for a lawnmower. Since the shop did not want it, he had to carry the mangle back up Headington Hill. He was then, in the same afternoon, told that Mrs Moore had lost her purse, and sent back into Oxford to enquire after it at the bus station. Each of these journeys would have taken in the region of twenty minutes into town and twenty minutes out again. It would be easy to suppose that the diary is a catalogue of complaints about this ceaseless succession of chores, but no breath of complaint about ‘D’ ever occurs in their pages. Readers who suppose that he is complaining about Mrs Moore are imagining what they would feel like if they had to rush out of a lecture, buy some margerine (sic) for Mrs Moore and cycle up Headington Hill with it before they went to their next academic assignment. But as readers of The Allegory of Love were to be reminded thirteen years later, ‘to leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one’s lady, or even of any lady, would seem but honourable and natural to a gentleman of the thirteenth or even of the seventeenth century; and most of us have gone shopping in the twentieth with ladies who showed no sign of regarding the tradition as a dead letter.’15