C. S. Lewis – A Life Read online

  Having virtually no students by 1917, Oxford’s colleges had to find ways of coping with a drastic reduction in their income. University College, normally bustling, had only a handful of students in residence.96 In 1914, the college boasted 148 undergraduates in residence; this plummeted to seven in 1917. A rare group photograph of college members taken in Trinity Term 1917 shows only ten people. Under the emergency statutes introduced in May 1915, University College relieved seven of its nine tutorial fellows of their duties; there was little for them to do.

  Faced with a collapse in student numbers, University College needed funds urgently. Its internal sources of income slumped from £8,755 in 1913 to £925 in 1918.97 Like many other colleges, it came to depend on the War Office as a source of income. University College rented out college rooms and facilities for use as troop barracks and military hospitals. Other colleges provided accommodation for refugees from war-torn Europe, especially Belgium and Serbia.

  At this stage, much of University College was given over to use as a military hospital. Lewis was allocated room 5 on staircase XII in Radcliffe Quad. While Lewis may have been physically present in an Oxford college, he cannot really be said to have begun his Oxford education at this time. There was hardly anyone available to tutor him, and few lectures were being given anywhere in the university. Lewis’s early impressions of the college were dominated by its “vast solitude.”98 One evening in July 1917, he wandered through silent staircases and empty passages, marvelling at its “strange poetry.”99

  3.1 The undergraduates of University College, Trinity Term 1917. Lewis is standing on the right-hand side of the back row. The college don in the centre of the photograph is John Behan, Stowell Law Fellow from 1909–1918, whose contract of employment was “continued for the emergency period.”

  Lewis’s main object in coming into residence in the summer term of 1917 was to join the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps.100 He submitted his application on 25 April, before arriving in Oxford.101 His application was accepted without difficulty five days later, this positive response partly reflecting the fact that Lewis had already served in the Combined Cadet Force at Malvern School.102 The college dean refused to arrange any academic tuition for him, on the grounds that his courses with the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps would take up all his time. Undeterred, Lewis made a private arrangement to be taught algebra under John Edward Campbell (1862–1924) of Hertford College, who refused to accept any fee for his services.103

  Why this sudden concern to become proficient at mathematics, not normally seen as relevant to the study of the life and thought of the classical world? The answer lies partly in Lewis’s desire to pass Responsions, but mainly in Albert Lewis’s essentially correct perception that his son would stand a much better chance of surviving the war if he were to become an artillery officer.104 Much better to be bombarding the Germans from well behind the front lines than to engage in the lethal trench warfare that had already claimed so many lives. However, the Royal Artillery required a knowledge of mathematics on the part of its officers, especially trigonometry, that Lewis simply did not have at this stage. It soon became painfully clear to Lewis that he would never master this field. He gloomily informed his father that his “chances of getting into the gunners” were low, as they recruited only officers “who can be shown to have some special knowledge of mathematics.”105

  Lewis’s brief time at University College made a deep impression on him. He shared some of his feelings and experiences with Arthur Greeves, and rather fewer of them with his father and brother. He wrote to Greeves about the delights of bathing “without the tiresome convention of bathing things,” and the wonderfully atmospheric library of the Oxford Union Society. “I never was happier in my life.”106 He seems to have invented other experiences for his father’s benefit, being particularly anxious to conceal his increasingly trenchant atheism. He wrote to Albert Lewis about church and churches, but did not actually attend them.

  Lewis was left in no doubt that he was being trained for trench warfare. His letters to his father towards the end of his time with the Officers’ Training Corps deal with the preparations for war in France, including his description of model trenches, complete with “dug outs, shell holes and—graves.”107 After appraising Lewis’s record, Lieutenant G. H. Claypole, the adjutant of the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, reported that Lewis was “likely to make a useful officer, but will not have had sufficient training for admission to an O[fficer] T[raining] U[unit] before the end of June. INFANTRY.” Lewis’s fate was sealed. He would be sent to an infantry unit—almost certainly to fight in the trenches of France.

  The Officer Cadet at Keble College

  The Great War ruined lives and shattered dreams, forcing many to abandon their hopes for the future in order to serve their country. Lewis is a classic example of the reluctant soldier—a young man with literary and scholarly ideals and ambitions, who found his life redirected and reshaped by forces over which he had no control, and which he ultimately could not resist. University College saw 770 students serve in the Great War; 175 of these were killed in battle. Even in his short time at University College in the summer of 1917, Lewis would have been aware of how many of the College’s undergraduates had gone to war, never to return. The fate of so many is captured in the sombre lines of the 1916 poem “The Spires of Oxford,” by Winifred Mary Letts (1882–1972):108

  I saw the spires of Oxford

  As I was passing by,

  The grey spires of Oxford

  Against a pearl-grey sky;

  My heart was with the Oxford men

  Who went abroad to die.

  Lewis would train alongside other young men of ideals and ambition, many seeing their enforced wartime service as “doing their bit” for their country, hoping to pick up their lives and start all over again once the war was over. Space allows us to note only one such example—the adjutant of the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps, who fatefully recommended that Lewis serve in the infantry.

  Gerald Henry Claypole (1894–1961) served as lieutenant in the 5th King’s Royal Rifle Corps.109 He resigned his commission on 8 February 1919 due to ill health. Jerry Claypole had a love of English literature, which eventually led him to become Senior English Master at King Edward VII School in Sheffield in 1941. He retired in 1958, and died in January 1961. His obituary in the school magazine commented on his strong belief “that literature was to be experienced and enjoyed, not to be made the subject of theorising and argument”—precisely the views that Lewis himself would later develop and champion.110 It is highly likely that Claypole would have read some of Lewis’s writings, not least his introduction to Paradise Lost. Would Claypole have realised that he had played such a significant role in the subsequent twistings and turnings of Lewis’s life? We shall never know.

  What we do know is that on 7 May 1917, Lewis began training as a potential infantry officer in the British army. He was now irreversibly committed to active military service. By a welcome quirk of fate, this did not mean leaving Oxford and transferring to one of the many training camps then scattered throughout Britain. Lewis was transferred from the Oxford University Officers’ Training Corps and posted to E Company, No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, stationed at Keble College, Oxford.111

  A “School of Instruction” for Oxford students who were potential officers was established in January 1915. Some three thousand officer cadets passed through the school.112 In February 1916, with the needs of the war effort in mind, the British army altered its regulations concerning officer cadets. Potential officers would have to be trained at an Officer Cadet Battalion. Only those aged over eighteen years and six months, and who were already serving in the ranks or had attended an Officers’ Training Corps, were eligible to apply. Even though Lewis had been a member of the Officers’ Training Corps for only a few weeks, this was enough to allow him to train as a future officer at one of the Officer Cadet Battalions.

  Tw
o such units were based at Oxford: No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion and No. 6 Officer Cadet Battalion. Each of these maintained a nominal strength of 750, and were billeted in otherwise empty Oxford colleges. No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion consisted of five companies of cadets, from A through E. Lewis was assigned to E Company, and billeted in Keble College. Lewis was relieved to remain in Oxford. Having to live at Keble College was, however, another matter.

  3.2 Keble College, Oxford, as photographed by Henry W. Taunt (1860–1922) in 1907. The characteristic brickwork of the college, which contrasted sharply with the stone of other Oxford colleges of this period, is clearly visible.

  Keble was one of Oxford’s more recent collegiate foundations,113 with a grim reputation for its High Church Anglicanism and its somewhat Spartan living conditions. In founding Keble College in 1870, its sponsors had aimed to create an institution where an Oxford education could be made available for “gentlemen wishing to live economically.” As a result, living conditions in the college were frugal and austere at the best of times. The additional privations caused by the war meant that the college offered only the most basic of comforts to its unfortunate occupants.

  Lewis had to leave a rather comfortable set of rooms at University College for “a carpetless little cell with two beds (minus sheets or pillows) at Keble.”114 Lewis shared this miserable room with Edward Francis Courtenay (“Paddy”) Moore, an officer cadet of almost exactly his own age,115 who had also been assigned to E Company of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, joining the same day as Lewis himself: 7 May 1917. The majority of cadets who passed through Oxford on this course were not members of Oxford University. Some came from Cambridge; others—such as Moore—had little or no background in higher education. Although Moore had come to Oxford from Bristol, he had been born in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire), County Dublin. We see here an early example of Lewis’s tendency to become close to people of Irish extraction—such as Theobold Butler and Nevill Coghill—while in England.

  Along with Moore, Lewis formed friendships with four other young men in E Company: Thomas Kerrison Dawey, Denis Howard de Pass, Martin Ashworth Somerville, and Alexander Gordon Sutton. Lewis could not have known it, but eighteen months later he would mourn his colleagues. “I remember five of us at Keble, and I am the only survivor.”116

  From his correspondence of this period, it seems that Lewis was initially drawn to Somerville, rather than to his roommate, Moore. Somerville, he tells his father in a letter written a few days after joining the battalion, is his “chief friend,” who, though quiet, is “very booky and interesting”; Moore, however, was a “little too childish for real companionship.”117 Yet Lewis had little time for reading now; days of trench digging and forced marches put an end to that. Only his weekends were free; these he spent back in his rooms at University College, catching up on his correspondence.

  Yet as time passed, Lewis seems to have formed an increasingly close friendship with Moore. Lewis and his small group of friends went frequently to the nearby lodgings of Paddy’s mother, Mrs. Jane King Moore. Mrs. Moore, originally from County Louth in Ireland, had separated from her husband, a civil engineer in Dublin, and had temporarily moved to Oxford from Bristol with her twelve-year-old daughter, Maureen, to be close to Paddy. At that time, she had taken rooms in Wellington Square, not far from Keble College. When Lewis first met Mrs. Moore, she was forty-five years old—almost exactly the same age as Lewis’s mother, Flora, when she had died in 1908.

  3.3 C. S. Lewis (left) and Paddy Moore (right) in Oxford during the summer of 1917. The identity of the figure to the back of the photograph is unknown.

  It is clear from correspondence that Lewis and Mrs. Moore found each other attractive and engaging. Lewis first mentioned this “Irish lady” in a letter to his father of 18 June.118 Mrs. Moore later wrote to Albert Lewis in October of that year, remarking that his son, who was her son’s roommate, was “very charming and most likeable and won golden opinions from everyone he met.”119

  The wartime Battalion Orders for No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion, commanded by Lieutenant-Colonel J. G. Stenning, have survived in the form of a yellowing set of duplicated foolscap sheets.120 These documents, covering the years 1916–1918, are clearly incomplete and do not give a full picture of the identity or activities of this training unit. Not all of the officer cadets are mentioned specifically by name, and some names are incorrectly entered. For example, Paddy Moore was initially registered as “E. M. C. Moore”—an error corrected a week later to “E. F. C. Moore.”121 Nevertheless, despite their incompleteness and errors, these records give us a good picture of the training Lewis would have received—courses in the use of the “Lewis gun” (as the Lewis Automatic Machine Gun was popularly known) and how to survive a gas attack, compulsory church parades on Sunday, rules about discussing military matters with civilians, arrangements for intercollegiate cricket matches, and physical training exercises. Other records give us a good idea of the sort of training Lewis would have had in using weapons, especially rifles.122

  The records also reveal the surprising fact that there were two C. S. Lewises in training at Keble College in the summer of 1917. The C. S. Lewis on which our narrative focusses joined E Company on 7 May 1917.123 On 5 July 1917, another C. S. Lewis, assigned to the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, joined C Company.124 Three months later, this Lewis was “discharged to commission” in the 6th Middlesex Regiment.125

  It is clear from his correspondence of July 1917 that Lewis himself had become aware that another C. S. Lewis was also in training at Keble College at that time. He emphasised the importance of including “E Company” on any letters addressed to him, in order to keep correspondence intended for him from being delivered to the other C. S. Lewis, attached to C Company.126 So who was this second C. S. Lewis? Happily, the records are good enough to allow an answer to this question.

  Shortly after the end of the war, a complete list of every cadet who trained in C Company of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion was drawn up by their company commander, Captain F. W. Matheson, and checked against the official British army list of December 1918. Matheson then wrote to every known member of the company, and—where he received a reply—published their most recent address. This rare document, published privately by Keble College in 1920, includes the following reference:127

  Lewis, C. S. 2nd Lt., 6th Middlesex Regt.

  Brynawel, Pentala, Aberavon.

  The annotation clearly indicates that Matheson was able to establish contact with this Lewis from C Company after the war and confirm his address—in South Wales. It is possible that confusion over these two C. S. Lewises may account for the War Office’s failure to pay Lewis some salary he was owed around this time.128

  Lewis’s Wartime Experiences at Oxford

  On 24 October 1922, Lewis returned to University College for a meeting of the Martlets, a college literary society that he had been instrumental in reestablishing after the Great War. The group, Lewis discovered, were meeting on this occasion in the set of rooms that he himself had occupied in 1917. His diary entry for that day in 1922 is of interest, as it relates three memories of significance to him dating from five years earlier:

  Here I first was brought home drunk: here I wrote some of the poems in Spirits in Bondage. D had been in this room.129

  Each of these memories alerts us to key aspects of Lewis’s personal development during his time at Oxford in the summer of 1917. Only one of them was literary in character.

  The first such memory concerns a dinner party in June 1917, when Lewis became “royally drunk.” Lewis recalls the dinner as being at Exeter College; the evidence suggests it may actually have been at nearby Brasenose College, which itself points to Lewis’s state of drunkenness on the evening in question. Disinhibited under the influence of what were clearly substantial quantities of alcohol, Lewis unwisely let slip his growing interest in sadomasochism, which he had already confided a little shamefully to Arthur Greeves.130 Lewis recalls that he went
around imploring everyone to let him “whip them for the sum of 1s. a lash.”131 Lewis had no other memory of that debauched evening, other than waking up on the floor of his own room in University College the next morning.

  This intriguing streak in the young Lewis’s character seems to have emerged earlier that year, and led him to investigate the erotic writings of the Marquis de Sade (1740–1814). Lewis also took pleasure around this time in reading the sections of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1770) dealing with the pleasures of beating, and compared himself to William Morris (1834–1896) as “a special devotee of the rod.” He apologised to Greeves at one point for writing a letter “across his knee,” only to find that this phrase triggered distracting erotic associations in his mind:

  “Across my knee” of course makes one think of positions for Whipping: or rather not for whipping (you couldn’t get any swing) but for that torture with brushes. This position, with its childish, nursery associations wd. have something beautifully intimate and also very humiliating for the victim.132

  Although Lewis’s flagellant fantasies generally concerned beautiful women (possibly including Greeves’s sister Lily),133 his Oxford letters suggest he was also prepared to extend these to young men.

  Three of his letters to Arthur Greeves of early 1917 are signed “Philomastix” (Greek, “lover of the whip”).134 In these letters, Lewis tries to explain something of his growing fascination with the “sensuality of cruelty,” in the knowledge that Greeves did not share it and would not condone it. “Very, very few,” Lewis conceded, were “affected in this strange way”135—and Greeves was certainly not one of them. Indeed, Lewis used a nickname for Greeves from about the spring of 1915 to the summer of 1918—“Galahad,” a reference to his confidant’s purity and ability to withstand the temptations to which Lewis himself clearly felt drawn.