Letters of C. S. Lewis Read online

  Through all these years, from 1925 onwards, Jack was bearing the exacting and sometimes tedious burdens of a college tutor and a University lecturer. He would take two or three pairs of pupils for tuition in his own rooms in College every morning, and then go to Headington for lunch; in the afternoon, if he was in luck, he would be allowed to take a walk, returning for tea, and then he would return to College for the rest of the day and for the night. He had, therefore, a precarious freedom from domestic drudgery: later on, however, he took to sleeping at home instead of in College, at some loss to this freedom.

  His rooms at Magdalen were magnificent: a big sitting-room on the first floor of New Buildings, looking out on to the Grove, and another and smaller sitting-room and a bedroom, looking across to the Cloisters and the Tower. But he had to furnish these rooms himself at his own expense, and did so in perfunctory and notably economical style: the effect, described by Mr Betjeman as ‘arid’, continued long after Jack could have afforded new furniture, better chosen and more comfortable. My father suggested, plausibly, that Jack chose this furniture as he chose his clothes—by a hurried acceptance of the first thing offered to him by the shop-keeper. This was part of his general impatience with the mechanical business of living: to get his hair cut, to go to the bank, to go shopping—all such activities were a penance and a burden. His own clothes were a matter of complete indifference to him: he had an extraordinary knack of making a new suit look shabby the second time he wore it. One of his garments has passed into legend. It is said that Jack once took a guest for an early-morning walk round Addison’s Walk, after a very wet night. Presently the guest brought his attention to a curious lump of cloth hanging on a bush. ‘That looks like my hat!’ said Jack; then, joyfully, ‘It is my hat!’ and clapping the sodden mass on to his head, he continued the walk.

  This fine indifference was not extended to food: in that matter his requirements were simple but strongly felt. Plain domestic cookery was what he wanted, with the proviso that if the food was hot the plates should be hot as well. What he really disliked was ‘messed-up food’, by which he meant any sort of elaborately dressed dish: he could never be persuaded to experiment with new foods. Normally, he drank nothing at table: on special occasions, he liked to share a bottle of Burgundy or Hock, and in College he usually drank a glass of port after dinner. One oddly feminine trait was the immense importance which he attached to afternoon tea. When we were off on a walking tour together, or out on my motor-cycle with Jack in the sidecar, the whole day had to be planned around the necessity of finding ourselves at four o’clock in some place where afternoon tea would be available. The only time I ever saw him really disgruntled in any matter of eating or drinking came in Ireland: we were motoring with a friend, and found no tea in a place where we had counted on it. The friend and I naturally dived into the nearest pub for whisky and soda: Jack refused even this consolation.

  These various holidays and tours were a great feature of his life and mine: they were inspired by a joy in landscape that developed out of the Boxonian visions of our childhood and was—together with books—the most enduring element in cementing our friendship. Until 1939 our annual walking tour was a regular fixture: on these long days, and during the pleasant evening hours when we took our ease in an inn, Jack was always at his most exuberant, his most whimsical, his most perceptive—the overworked cabhorse released from the shafts and kicking his heels.

  Over-worked he certainly was: not only by the burden of his routine work as tutor and lecturer, not only by the domestic tasks laid on him by Mrs Moore (‘He is as good as an extra maid in the house’, she would say complacently to visitors), but also by the extent and depth of his own reading, the creative effort of original work both scholarly and religious, and (as the years passed) the increasing volume of his correspondence, much of it from total strangers. In view of all this, visitors to his rooms were often struck by the modest size of his personal library. In his younger days he was something of a bibliophile, but in the middle and later life he very seldom bought a book if he could consult it in the Bodleian: long years of poverty, self-inflicted but grinding, had made this economical habit second nature to him—a factor that contributed, no doubt, to the extraordinarily retentive character of his memory.

  For all their arid furnishings and their few books, those rooms in Magdalen came by habit and long association to seem cosy and home-like. When I left the army I made them my own headquarters, and was able to give Jack some help of secretarial and similar kinds: and it was in these rooms that many generations of students enjoyed and suffered the stimulation of his erudite and dialectical mind. Since his death, a number of tributes and reminiscences from former pupils have come into my hands: from these I would like to summarise one, provided by Mr H. M. Blamires, who began to read English with Jack in 1936, and who has managed to convey admirably the particular flavour of those tutorial hours.

  He was personally interested in his pupils and permanently concerned about those who became his friends. Though he was a most courteous and considerate person his frankness could, when he wanted, cut through the ordinary fabric of reticences with a shock of sudden warmth or sudden devastation, indeed of both at once. No one knew better how to nourish a pupil with encouragement and how to press just criticism when it was needed, without causing resentment. He did not think of himself as taking pupils through a course; rather he saw his pupils as having two years or so under his guidance, during which they could start on a process which would occupy the responsive ones for the rest of their lives. The literature stood waiting on the shelves; the pupil’s appetite was to be whetted and fed. It would be wrong to give the impression that he encouraged indiscriminate reading. Once I went to a tutorial proudly nursing a substantial and, as I thought, admirably comprehensive essay on Abraham Cowley. Half-way through I undertook a critical survey of Cowley’s historical epic, the Davideis. Well launched upon my reading of this survey, I was suddenly conscious of Lewis rocking in suppressed amusement. Eventually he interrupted me gently. ‘But you don’t mean to say you’ve actually read the thing?’ The tone was of mock horror. ‘Every word,’ I said. ‘I’m terribly sorry,’ he said gravely, as though nothing could atone for the suffering he had unwittingly brought upon me. Then he brightened, having found the crumb of consolation. ‘But think of it. You must be the only man in the country, perhaps the only man alive, to have read every word of Cowley’s Davideis.’ He expected you to share his life-long companionship with his favourite authors. There was never a fit point in life for saying ‘Yes, I’ve read Malory or Spenser or Milton’. It would be like saying, ‘Yes, I’ve eaten bacon and eggs’. There was a good deal of fun about tutorials. Lewis sat there on his vast Chesterfield, smoking a pipe and cigarettes alternately, periodically beaming and bouncing with good humour in a hugely expansive way. He looked big, sitting down opposite one, with his great fist bulging round a pipe bowl, eyes wide open and eyebrows raised behind a cloud of smoke. As a lecturer he was the biggest ‘draw’ the English School had in the nineteen-thirties. He could fill the largest lecture rooms. He was popular because his lectures were meaty. He purveyed what was wanted in a palatable form. Proportion and direction were always preserved, but without forcing. Points were clearly enumerated; arguments beautifully articulated; illustrations richly chosen. The physical images of the Lewis of the ’thirties that stay with me are symbols rather than clearly defined pictures. One remembers his shapeless hat and ill-fitting overcoat seen to peculiar disadvantage from the top of a bus . . . the rich, chanting voice at one of his Thursday ‘Beer and Beowulf’ evenings, the big red face bulging out of the graceless clothes, and alive with a zest and intensity which won and warmed you in defiance of aesthetic considerations. It is not easy to carry together in the mind the picture Lewis presented in a relaxed mood and the realization of the vast amount of work he did. His liking for beer and bawdy late-night talk might together have misled the unobservant with a completely false picture. His hospitality, like
his help, generously but unforcingly offered, was easy to accept, easy to decline.

  His ‘churchmanship’ could not be labelled. It was never the meaningful things or the important things that displeased him from the ‘Catholic’ side; it was excessive ritualistic concern over inessentials, or the exaggeration of trivialities.

  It would be quite wrong to imagine that Lewis’s deep and unfailing charity left him incapable of being decisive and frank about defect in others. He would not gossip. He would not sustain a malicious conversation. But he would not conspire to veil a person’s deficiency if it might be harmful to veil it. He did his best to be scrupulously fair in his judgements. Praise and criticism were always absolutely honest. He had a near-fanatical devotion to Charles Williams, but when Williams wrote a bad book Lewis readily described it as ‘bloody awful’.

  It was, of course, during these years at Magdalen that Jack underwent his re-conversion to Christianity, and also developed into a best-selling author of international reputation. A certain reticence in the one matter, and in the other a conviction that writers more scholarly than myself will be studying my brother’s literary work for many years to come, lead me to pass over these subjects briefly.

  I well remember that day in 1931 when we made a visit to Whipsnade Zoo, Jack riding in my sidecar: as recorded in Surprised by Joy, it was during that outing that he made his decision to rejoin the Church. This seemed to me no sudden plunge into a new life, but rather a slow, steady convalescence from a deep-seated spiritual illness of long standing—an illness that had its origins in our childhood, in the dry husks of religion offered by the semi-political church-going of Ulster, in the similar dull emptiness of compulsory church during our schooldays. With this background, we both found the difficulty of the Christian life to lie in public worship, rather than in one’s private devotions. In Jack’s case, this difficulty was overcome slowly: he had been a practising Christian again for some time when he said to me, of Communion: ‘I think that to communicate once a month strikes the right balance between enthusiasm and Laodiceanism.’ In later years he saw that ‘right balance’ differently, and never failed to communicate weekly and on the major feast days as well.

  I offer no gloss or comment upon his own experience and understanding of the Christian religion itself: to the profit of many thousands, he has himself told all that words can carry. So far as his outward life was concerned, his conversion had various consequences: it was the occasion of a notable literary development, of wide popularity coupled with hostility in some quarters, and of certain war-time lecturing engagements with the RAF and the BBC. It was in connection with his religious rather than his scholarly writing that his name became a household word in the ’forties and ’fifties, and the same emphasis may be behind the two honorary degrees conferred upon him—the Doctorate of Divinity (1946) by St Andrews, and the Doctorate of Literature (1952) by Laval University, Quebec. (A further honour, the C.B.E., was offered by the Prime Minister in 1951, but Jack felt obliged to refuse this: his appearance in a Conservative Honours List might, he felt, strengthen the ill-founded case of those who identified religious writing with anti-leftist propaganda.)

  The remarkable thing about his literary career is that it never occurred to him until a relatively late date that his great achievement would be in prose. Spirits in Bondage appeared in 1919, a collection of poems, some of them written in his Bookham days: Dymer, a narrative poem, was published in 1926, the fruit of much pain and effort during a peculiarly difficult period. During all these early years, he thought of himself (though with no great confidence) as essentially a poet. A certain feeling of alienation from the poetic currents of his time led him to publish pseudonymously: those first two books were by ‘Clive Hamilton’ (his own first name, and his mother’s maiden surname), and the many poems that he published in later years were signed ‘Nat Whilk’ (Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not who’) or, more simply, ‘N.W.’

  In 1933 he published The Pilgrim’s Regress and in 1936 The Allegory of Love. This latter book, on which he had been working since 1928, was immediately and permanently a success by every standard: and from that time on, my brother’s life was one of continual writing and continual publication for an ever-increasing and ever more appreciative audience. It may be observed at this point that to become a best-selling author does not necessarily involve full success in the task of ‘communication’. The two books into which Jack put most of himself—The Pilgrim’s Regress and Till We Have Faces—were in his own estimation failures, misunderstood or ignored by the public.

  It was with the publication of The Screwtape Letters in the autumn of 1942, that Jack first achieved wide public success of the kind that brings money rolling in. He was not used to this—his early penury had not trained him for relative affluence—and he celebrated by a lavish and improvident scattering of cheques to various societies and individual lame dogs. Before the situation got completely out of hand, his solicitor intervened: a charitable trust was set up into which two-thirds of his royalties was thereafter paid automatically, and from which payments both large and numerous were made for all manner of charitable purposes. The financial side of his charity was by no means limited to this particular arrangement, and the total of his benefactions will never be known; but over and above this, he had in an extraordinary degree the deeper charity that can perhaps best be described as a universal and sympathetic neighbourliness to all and sundry, strangers as well as acquaintances.

  Two examples of this quality come to my mind. One summer day he heard it mentioned casually that there was a sick man in a field some distance away. Jack said ‘poor devil’ and continued to write; then he suddenly jumped up in distress and said, ‘I have sinned; I have shown myself lacking in all charity’. Out he went, found the man, brought him to the house, gave him a drink, heard his story, and then—being satisfied that the man was able to look after himself—saw him off, not (I am sure) forgetting the Samaritan’s twopence. Then, on another occasion, he met a tramp while walking on Shotover—a tramp who turned the conversation to the subject of poetry, quoting Fitzgerald with gusto. Jack went home, armed himself with bottles of beer and a verse anthology, trudged up to the top of the hill again, gave book and beer to the tramp, and bade him a cordial farewell.

  During all these Magdalen years until Mrs Moore’s death in 1951, the domestic circumstances of Jack’s life continued to impose a heavy strain upon this habit of charity. Relations with his father were peaceful but distant. Jack wrote home in regular and informative style, but visits to ‘Little Lea’ had always a sad penitential character: in his later years my father became more and more of an inquisitor and tyrant, prying into every detail of his sons’ lives, interfering blindly in even the most personal matters. We were always glad to get away. The three of us were at home together for the last time in 1927: it is pleasant to record that my father noted this in his journal as ‘a very pleasant holiday—roses all the way’. In 1929 he died: I was in China at the time, and it fell to Jack to make the immediate arrangements for winding up the household at ‘Little Lea’.

  And at Oxford, for more than three decades, Jack continued to live under the autocracy of Mrs Moore—an autocracy that developed into stifling tyranny, as I experienced myself during the years of my inclusion within this incomprehensible ménage. Mrs Moore was one of those who thrive on crisis and chaos; every day had to have some kind of domestic scene or upheaval, commonly involving the maids: the emotional burden so created had then to be placed squarely on the uncomplaining shoulders of Jack. In this atmosphere the physical inconveniences of the household seemed relatively unimportant: notable among them was the total unpredictability of any meal-time.

  Jack’s servitude was made more burdensome, as the years passed, by Mrs Moore’s senility and invalidism: it was only broken by her admission to a nursing home in April 1950 and her death there nine months later.

  Four years after this Jack’s whole life changed, and for six years he was to experience firs
t peace and then a delight and fulfilment which had never previously come to him.

  In 1954 Jack accepted the offer of a new chair at Cambridge. He finished his last Oxford tutorial—with a certain sense of relief—on 3 December, and the New Year found him installed at Cambridge as Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance English. His inaugural lecture, later printed under the title of De Descriptione Temporum, was a crowded and memorable occasion: it added a new phrase to the colloquial jargon of the time, and many people could be heard for a while thereafter proclaiming stoutly that they were, or were not, specimens of ‘Old Western Man’. Dr G. M. Trevelyan, who was then Master of Trinity, presided on this occasion: he introduced Jack by revealing that this was the only university appointment in the whole of his experience for which the electing committee had voted unanimously.

  Jack found the life at Cambridge and the company at Magdalene congenial, mentally stimulating yet relaxed. His years there were happy years. The break with his old life was not complete: he continued to live at The Kilns, passing there not only his vacations but also many week-ends in term. He necessarily resigned his Fellowship at Magdalen, but was immediately reelected to an Honorary Fellowship: and with his Cambridge chair went a Fellowship there under the same patronage, at Magdalene.

  Meanwhile he had met the woman who was to bring him so much happiness in love and marriage. Joy Davidman was American by birth and Jewish by race. She and her husband, William Lindsay Gresham, were avid admirers of Jack’s work and became Christians partly under his influence. She met Jack for the first time in 1953, having already corresponded with him at some length. Later, and free now to marry again, she returned to England with her two sons, intending to live there permanently. By 1955 she was on close terms with Jack. For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met (although as his letters show, he had known with great affection many able women) who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and sense of fun. Further, she shared his delight in argument for argument’s sake, whether frivolous or serious, always good-humoured yet always meeting him trick for trick as he changed ground. A woman of great charity, she had an unbounded contempt for the sentimental. Setting herself high standards, she could laugh at the seeming absurdities to which they sometimes carried her. With all this, she was intensely feminine.