C. S. Lewis – A Life Read online

  On 4 August, Lewis took a bus into Oxford, and went to the Examination Schools to find out when the results of the final examinations would be posted. To his surprise, he discovered that they were already displayed. He was relieved to discover that he was one of the nineteen students who had secured First Class Honours. But what was he to do next?

  In the end, Lewis threw all his hopes and efforts into winning the fellowship in classics offered by Magdalen College.215 The fellowship would be one of three offered by the college that year which would be awarded by open competition through an extended written examination. On 29 September, Lewis turned up with ten other hopefuls at Magdalen for the first examination.216 He was discouraged when he realised the calibre of the other candidates, including future academic stars such as A. C. Ewing (1899–1973) and E. R. Dodds (1893–1979). (Dodds went on to become Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford in 1936.) Aware of how slim his chances were, Lewis confided to his diary that he would “act as though” he had “not got the fellowship,” and prepare to study for the School of English.217 It was not until 12 October that Lewis finally learned that the Magdalen fellowship had been awarded to another candidate.218 But by then, Lewis had already followed his tutors’ advice and thrown himself fully into the study of English.

  Sir Herbert Warren (1853–1930), president of Magdalen College, wrote personally to Lewis in November, confirming that he had not been elected to the fellowship in classics and offering some feedback. Magdalen had elected three new fellows around that time, and Warren explained that Lewis had come close to being one of them. The fact remained, however, that the college had offered the fellowship in classics to another candidate:

  I am afraid you cannot have done yourself full justice, whatever may have been the reason, although you came well up, and were one of six especially mentioned to the College as having reached the Fellowship standard, and worthy of election, you were not one of the three finally recommended.219

  Warren’s letter mingled affirmation and criticism in about equal measure. Yet the shrewd reader of that letter quickly realises that its covert message was ultimately encouraging. The talent was there, but the moment was not right. There might be another opportunity.

  Lewis’s diaries and correspondence of 1920–1922 bear witness to his personal anxieties and plans for the future, not least concerning his employment prospects. If he could not secure an academic position in classics, might he find one in philosophy instead? His undergraduate studies had given him a firm grasp of the subject. Yet Lewis’s preoccupation with his own future seems to have blinded him to other matters, most notably the serious tensions in his native Ireland. Lewis makes curiously little reference to the momentous events of 1920–1923, in which Ireland was convulsed by political turmoil. The political struggle for Irish independence, given new energy by the Great War, had erupted into violence in 1919. The British began to lose control of rural areas of Ireland to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). On “Bloody Sunday” (21 November 1920), the IRA shot dead fourteen British intelligence operatives and informers in Dublin. Later that day the British authorities retaliated at Croke Park, also killing fourteen people. Violence spread to the northern cities of Londonderry and Belfast. The Protestant community felt under threat from Republican gunmen.

  In 1920, the British government offered limited home rule to Ireland. It was not enough. The Irish wanted political and national independence, not some form of devolved government. The violence continued. On 11 July 1921, a truce was declared. Yet it did not stop the violence in Belfast. Finally, the British government agreed to the creation of the Irish Free State on 6 December 1922. The six predominantly Protestant northern counties were given a month from that date to decide whether they wished to remain part of the Irish Free State or rejoin the United Kingdom. A day later, the parliament of Northern Ireland requested that it be allowed to become part of the United Kingdom again. Ireland was now partitioned.

  Lewis seems to have been curiously indifferent to and disengaged from these developments, despite their momentous implications for his family and friends in Ireland. According to Lewis’s diary entry for the critical date of 6 December 1922, the big question on his mind was not Irish independence, nor the political future of Belfast, nor the safety of his father, but whether the word breakfast was to be understood as “a cup of tea at eight or a roast of beef at eleven.”220 So why this astonishing lack of interest in the biggest political and social upheaval in Ireland during his lifetime? Perhaps the most obvious answer is also the most persuasive: Lewis did not see himself as belonging there anymore. His home, his real family, and his heart were in Oxford. Mrs. Moore, not Albert Lewis, was the lodestar of his family life.

  Mrs. Moore: The Cornerstone of Lewis’s Life

  At this point, we need to explore Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore in a little more detail. Lewis’s unusual domestic arrangements were not well known at Oxford. During the 1930s, most of his acquaintances had the impression that Lewis was a typical bachelor don, who lived with his “old mother” in Headington. Few knew that his mother had died in his childhood, and that the so-called “mother” in question played a rather more complex role in Lewis’s life.

  Many accounts of Lewis’s personal life take their cue from Warnie’s frequently expressed dislike of Mrs. Moore, leading them to characterise this relationship in quite negative terms. She is portrayed as a domineering, selfish, and demanding woman, who often treated Lewis like a servant or errand-boy, and offered him little in the way of intellectual stimulation.

  There are good reasons for accepting some such evaluation of the situation in the late 1940s, when Mrs. Moore’s health began to fail and she became increasingly difficult as dementia set in. Yet Lewis’s difficulties at this later stage were probably caused as much by Warnie’s alcoholism as by the ailing Mrs. Moore’s petulant demands. But we must not read the situation of two decades later back into these early days. A younger Mrs. Moore was there for him when Lewis needed the emotional support and comfort which no other member of his family seemed able or willing to provide—at the time of his departure to war in France (his father’s absence being especially hurtful to Lewis), during his convalescence from his war wounds, and as he sought to secure an academic position at Oxford. It is arguable that Mrs. Moore created an environment of relative structure and stability for him on his return from combat, easing his transition into academic life.

  Lewis, it must be remembered, was separated from his mother by death, and from his family through his father’s ill-considered (if well-intentioned) decision to send him away to boarding school in England. In 1951, the British psychologist John Bowlby (1907–1990) produced a study for the World Health Organization dealing with the mental health problems of children displaced by war. His main conclusion was that childhood experiences of interpersonal relationships were crucial to their psychological development.221 Bowlby went on to develop the notion of a “secure base,” from which the child could learn to cope with challenges, develop independence, and mature emotionally. But Bowlby’s research came too late to influence Albert Lewis’s decisions. Lewis clearly possessed such a “secure base” as a young boy; it was, however, shattered by the death of his mother and his enforced attendance at boarding school.

  Lewis’s comments in Surprised by Joy about the impact of his mother’s death deserve close attention: “It was all sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.”222 Lewis’s rich language uses geographical imagery to describe his emotional loss of stability and security, inevitably leading to a longing for their future restoration. He was like someone doomed to sail the seas, unable to find a safe and permanent harbour. Lewis’s writings of the 1920s provide strong evidence that Mrs. Moore’s extended family came to provide that secure base for him. She offered him emotional support and encouragement as he explored career options, and coped with his early failure to secure them. However, she was no intellectual, and was unable to function as his acade
mic soul mate—a point which helps us understand Lewis’s later attraction to intelligent women, capable of writing serious books. Yet Mrs. Moore arguably provided Lewis with vital elements of the context he needed at this formative stage of his scholarly career.

  Perhaps most obviously, Mrs. Moore provided Lewis with a ready-made family. His diaries from 1922 to 1925 show him to have developed a settled and secure family life—something he thought he had lost after the death of his mother at Little Lea. Maureen became a sister to him, and he became a brother to her. Maureen is too easily neglected in accounts of Lewis’s development; his diaries make more appreciative reference to her than many realise.

  4.4 “The Family”: Lewis, Maureen, and Mrs. Moore on the balcony of a tea shop in St. Agnes Cove, Cornwall, in 1927.

  There is no doubt that Lewis ended up doing all kinds of menial household chores—running to get margarine from a corner store, retrieving Mrs. Moore’s purse from the bus station, or responding immediately to the sudden collapse of Mrs. Moore’s bedroom curtain rails. But he was the only man in the household, and appears to have willingly pulled his weight to ensure its smooth running. These things had to be done, and Lewis did them. In any case, Lewis came to see such tasks as examples of the tradition of “courtly love,” which he declared to be a noble and honourable code of conduct by which a young man might “leap up on errands” or “go through heat or cold, at the bidding of one’s lady.”223 Lewis might have been able to invest such household chores with dignity and significance by conceiving them as ennobling expressions of “courtly love.”

  Mrs. Moore also extended Lewis’s social circle. She was hospitable to a fault, regularly inviting family and friends to supper. Lewis found himself developing the relational skills and emotional intelligence that he might never have acquired had he remained cloistered within the walls of University College. As he himself was the first to admit, his own circle of friends was somewhat restricted. “I am apt to regard my own set, which consists mainly of literary gents,” he told his father, as being “central, normal and representative.”224 Lewis made relatively few friends while studying Greats; indeed, he seems to have earned the nickname “Heavy Lewis,”225 in that he was perceived to be “heavy going” by other students. (The unflattering name was probably a play on the Lewis Light Machine Gun of the Great War.) Lewis’s ability to relate to people may have been late in developing, but it was encouraged more by Mrs. Moore’s circle than by his own.

  The Moore household was also visited regularly by Maureen’s friends from Headington School. One of these—Mary Wiblin—features prominently in Lewis’s diary entries of the early 1920s. Wiblin (affectionately known as “Smudge”) was Maureen’s music teacher; by way of payment, Lewis taught her Latin. There are hints here of a possible romantic relationship with Lewis. Yet nothing ever developed, possibly due to Lewis’s complex relationship with Mrs. Moore.

  The Student of English Language and Literature, 1922–1923

  Oxford was late in recognising the importance of English literature as a subject worthy of serious academic study. Both University College London and King’s College London offered undergraduate courses in the subject from the 1830s. The growing importance of the subject was catalysed by a number of factors. The long reign of Queen Victoria had helped create a strong sense of English national identity. Just as important, many shrewd politicians realised the importance of emphasising how the English shared a rich literary tradition. A landmark in this development was the establishment of a Chair in English Language and Literature at Oxford in 1882. Yet no School of English existed until 1894, despite growing demand for such a development.226

  The simple truth is that Oxford resisted any such development. Indeed, the establishment of the School of English in 1894 was mired in controversy and bitterness. Some derided its introduction as a way of giving weaker students something easy and pointless to study. Others were alarmed at the danger of creating a new degree that would be seen as second-rate. Greats were meaty and substantial; how could English be anything other than subjective reflections on novels and poems? How could “mere chatter about Shelley”227 be taken with academic seriousness? It was impressionistic and superficial—not the sort of thing that Oxford University would wish to encourage.

  Nevertheless, the pressure for the academic study of English literature mounted.228 It was still seen by many traditionalists at Oxford as an undemanding subject, suitable for less able male students destined for the ranks of schoolmasters in England’s public schools—and, of course, for women. Many women, excluded from the study of the sciences and humanities at Oxford, saw the study of English literature as one of the few means of entering an educational career open to them. From 1892, the Association for Promoting the Higher Education of Women in Oxford organised a series of lectures and classes for their students, in which English literature featured prominently.

  A second group for whom the study of English literature became important in the later Victorian period was civil servants. The Indian Civil Service, anxious to ensure it recruited and promoted the best people, introduced examinations in English from 1855 onwards. Prospective imperial civil servants among Oxford’s undergraduates noted the way the wind was blowing and began to study English literature with their future career prospects in mind. Yet the emphasis at Oxford was clearly more on English than on literature. As British imperialism flourished in the later Victorian and Edwardian periods, the study of English literature came to be seen as a means of affirming and asserting English cultural superiority over the upstart Americans and the rebellious colonials.

  England’s final victory over Germany in the Great War of 1914–1918 provoked a minor surge of nationalism, which gave added patriotic motivation to the study of English literature. Yet the study of English literature at Oxford was augmented by factors other than a renewed nationalism. For many more thoughtful souls, literature offered a way of dealing with the trauma and destruction of the war, allowing them to frame their questions in new ways and find deeper spiritual solutions that went beyond the mere jingoism of the Establishment.

  The rise of the “war poets” is perhaps the most important of these developments. Many found comfort in their writings, allowing them to see the nightmare of the war in new and helpful ways. Others saw these poets as expressing a legitimate anger about the violence and futility of war, and sought to channel this anger in politically and socially constructive ways. The motivations for the study of English literature in the immediate postwar era may have been complex. They were, however, real, and led to a new interest in a field once regarded as culturally and intellectually inferior to the study of classics.

  By the 1920s, Oxford’s School of English Language and Literature was expanding, benefitting from a resurgence of interest in the subject after the war. For the historical reasons just noted, it was still initially dominated by women students and those with an interest in serving in the Indian Civil Service. As the Oxford school expanded, colleges began to take note of this trend. Tutorial fellowships in English Language and Literature began to be established. Lewis could hardly have failed to have been aware of this development. If he could not secure a position in classics or philosophy, there was now an alternative possibility.

  Lewis began his studies in English Language and Literature on 13 October 1922, when he met with A. S. L. Farquharson at University College to discuss his programme of study. Farquharson advised him to go to Germany and learn the language; the future, in his view, lay in European literature, and that was where the jobs would be. For obvious reasons, Lewis decided not to follow this advice. Neither Mrs. Moore nor Maureen would have had any enthusiasm for a visit to his former enemy, or for his extended absence when there was so much that needed to be done around the house.

  Lewis found the study of English exhausting. It demanded not merely a total immersion in a vast literature, but the acquisition of the linguistic skills needed to read some of its classic texts. But the real problem was that Lewi
s was doing a course in less than nine months that was designed to be studied over three years. Normally an undergraduate would spend the first year studying the basic literature and then move on to a more detailed study for the final two years of the course. Lewis was exempted from the first year of the course through having “senior status”—he already had an Oxford degree. But he would still need to cram the work of the final two years of the course into one; otherwise, he would have been “overstanding for Honours,” and could have been awarded only a pass degree. He desperately needed to win First Class Honours to make his scholarly mark and secure an academic job.

  A major gulf began to open up between the approaches to English literature at England’s two ancient universities at this time. Where the Oxford school focussed on historical, textual, and philological questions throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the Cambridge school—shaped by scholars such as I. A. Richards (1893–1979) and F. R. Leavis (1895–1978)—adopted a more theoretical approach, treating works of literature as “texts” or “objects” that could be subjected to scientific literary criticism. Lewis felt perfectly at home in the Oxford context. His focus was on texts and authors, and he developed an aversion to literary theory—a characteristic of his scholarly writings for the remainder of his career.

  Lewis’s study of English pressed him to his limits. He wrote relatively few letters during the academic year 1922–1923; many of these refer to his growing interest in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) and the demands that mastering this language made on him. He also became aware that there was a clear sociological distinction between his fellow students in Greats and those in English literature: the latter, he confided to his diary, consisted mainly of “women, Indians, and Americans” and possessed “a certain amateurishness” in comparison with Greats students.229 His diary for Michaelmas Term 1922 exudes a tangible sense of intellectual loneliness, occasionally alleviated by interesting lectures and stimulating conversations. But for the most part, Lewis derived his mental pleasures from books, often working to midnight to get through his reading list.