C. S. Lewis – A Life Read online

  Lewis’s teasing of Greeves on this point is clearly grounded in fact. Greeves’s personal diary around this time does indeed show a marked concern for his personal purity, especially after his confirmation into the Church of Ireland on 10 June 1917. This church service marked Greeves’s religious “coming of age,” which Greeves clearly regarded as a spiritual landmark. Perhaps unknown to Lewis, his friend seems to have been passing through some kind of crisis around this time. His diary mingles prayer that he may “keep pure minded”136 with darker concerns about the meaninglessness of life. “What a terrible life! What is it all for? Trust in Him.”137 The diaries reveal a lonely young man, who saw his friendship with Lewis and his faith in God as fixed stars in a gloomy and unstable firmament.

  The second memory relates to Lewis’s growing aspiration to be remembered as a poet. By this stage, there was increasing recognition of the category of the “war poet,” which included writers such as Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Robert Graves (1895–1985), and Rupert Brooke (1887–1915), the last of which achieved particular fame for three lines from “The Soldier”:

  If I should die, think only this of me:

  That there’s some corner of a foreign field

  That is for ever England.

  Brooke died of sepsis from an infected mosquito bite on 23 April 1915, on his way to fight in the Gallipoli campaign. He was buried in a “corner of a foreign field” in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros.

  Inspired by such examples, Lewis began to write his own war poetry during his time at Oxford, while preparing for conflict. These poems, published in March 1919 under the pseudonym “Clive Hamilton” (Hamilton was his mother’s maiden name), have never been well regarded, and are rarely reprinted. Lewis initially titled the poems Spirits in Prison: A Cycle of Lyrical Poems. Albert Lewis, who was more widely read than many appreciated, pointed out that a novel by this name had been published by Robert Hitchens in 1908. Lewis took the point, and changed the title to Spirits in Bondage.138

  Yet it is questionable whether Spirits in Bondage can properly be classified as war poetry. By my reckoning, over half of the poems in this collection were written before Lewis actually went to France and saw active service. These earlier poems are somewhat intellectualised reflections on war from a safe distance, untainted by the passions, despair, and brutality of the killing fields of France. The poems are often intellectually interesting, yet fail to sustain the poetic vision of a Sassoon or a Brooke.

  So what do these poems tell us about Lewis? They are, after all, the first significant published works from his pen.139 Stylistically, they perhaps show that Lewis’s voice had some way to go before it would achieve its mature authority. At this stage in his career, however, the poems are of particular interest on account of their witness to his trenchant atheism. The most interesting parts of the cycle are its protests against a silent, uncaring heaven. The “Ode for New Year’s Day,” written when under fire near the French town of Arras in January 1918, declares the final death of a God who was in any case a human fabrication. Any idea that the “red God” might “lend an ear” to human cries of misery lay discredited and abandoned in the mud, a disgraced “Power who slays and puts aside the beauty that has been.”140

  These lines are important, as they express two themes that were clearly deeply impressed upon Lewis’s mind at this time: his contempt for a God he did not believe to exist, yet wished to blame for the carnage and destruction that lay around him; and his deep longing for the safety and security of the past—a past he clearly believed to have been destroyed forever. This note of wistfulness over the irretrievability of a loved past is a recurrent theme in Lewis’s later writings.

  Perhaps the most important thing that Spirits in Bondage tells us about Lewis is aspirational—namely, that Lewis wanted to be remembered as a poet, and believed that he had the talent necessary to achieve this calling. Although Lewis is today remembered as a literary critic, apologist, and novelist, none of these corresponds to his own youthful dreams and hopes of his future. Lewis is a failed poet who found greatness in other spheres of writing. Yet some would say that, having failed as a writer of poetry, Lewis succeeded as a writer of prose—a prose saturated with the powerful rhythms and melodious phrasing of a natural poet.

  But what of the third memory? Who is “D”?141 And why does Lewis attach such importance to D’s visit to his room in 1917? As the later diary makes clear, the reference is to Mrs. Moore, with whom Lewis was then living. This complex relationship, of which we shall have much more to say in due course, began during Lewis’s time as an officer cadet at Keble College. Paddy Moore may have been the original occasion for Lewis’s intimacy with Moore’s mother, but the relationship rapidly developed independently of him.

  There is no doubt that Lewis was close to Paddy Moore. Indeed, the relationship may have been closer than most biographers realise. A personal bond appears to have developed between Lewis and Moore during the time they shared a room together at Keble College. To explore this point, let us reflect on the question of the regiment of the British army in which Lewis would serve. On 26 September 1917, Lewis received a temporary commission as second lieutenant in the 3rd Somerset Light Infantry and was given a month’s leave before being sent for further training in South Devon.142 Paddy Moore was given a commission in the Rifle Brigade and was posted to the Somme.

  But why did Lewis join the Somerset Light Infantry, when he had no family connections whatsoever with the county of Somerset? Most biographies fail to appreciate the importance of this question. There were certainly alternatives open to Lewis. One of the most obvious was the Oxford-based Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, to which many of the cadets of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion were assigned. His Belfast origins meant that Lewis would also have had the option of being posted to one of the Irish regiments. So why did he end up with a commission in the Somerset Light Infantry?

  Perhaps the Battalion Orders of No. 4 Officer Cadet Battalion contain a vital clue allowing us to answer this question. When an officer cadet is referred to in these documents, he is identified by the regiment to which he was provisionally assigned at the time of his recruitment, in which he would serve unless posted elsewhere—for example, as a result of technical skills he might demonstrate in training. The Battalion Orders indicate that the “other” C. S. Lewis, for example, was initially assigned to the Oxford and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, but ended up being commissioned into the 6th Middlesex Regiment. Those same Battalion Orders record Paddy Moore’s date of arrival at the course on 7 May 1917 in the following manner:143

  37072 Moore, E. M. C. Som L. I. 7.5.17

  The vital clue to Lewis’s choice of regiment lies here: Moore’s assigned regiment was the Somerset Light Infantry. This makes perfect sense, since the Moores’ home was in Redland, a suburb of the city of Bristol, which was treated as lying within the county of Somerset for military recruitment purposes. The corresponding entry in the Battalion Orders for Lewis makes it clear that he was initially assigned to the King’s Own Scottish Borderers.

  We therefore must take very seriously the possibility that Lewis requested a commission in the Somerset Light Infantry in the belief that this would allow him to serve alongside his close friend Paddy Moore. Was there some kind of pact between the two men, by which they would look after each other in the war? This possibility is strongly supported by Jane Moore’s letter to Albert Lewis of 17 October 1917, in which she expresses Paddy’s deep sorrow that he and Lewis would not be serving alongside each other in the Somersets.144 The tone of this letter makes perfect sense if there had been an expectation that the two men would both be posted to the Somerset Light Infantry, allowing them to face the challenges of conflict together.

  As it turned out, Moore was notified that he had been given a temporary commission in the Rifle Brigade a few days after Lewis received his commission in the Somerset Light Infantry. If our speculative line of exploration is correct, Lewis would have been
devastated when he learned that he would not be serving alongside his new friend. He would have to go to war alone, without any close friends to support him.

  It was during this visit to Bristol that Maureen Moore overheard Lewis and her brother enter into a pact. If either of them should die during conflict, the other would look after the deceased’s remaining parent. It is not clear whether this pact was devised before or after Moore learned that he had been posted to the Rifle Brigade. Yet this development can easily be seen as an expression of a deeper bond between the two men, which developed at Oxford.

  Lewis’s relationship with his own family went into tailspin around this time. Albert Lewis expected that Lewis would spend his leave with him at Little Lea in Belfast. In fact, Lewis went to stay with the Moores in Bristol for three weeks, paying only a somewhat reluctant and perfunctory visit to his father (12–18 October) before joining his regiment at Crownhill, a “village of wooden huts” near Plymouth.145 A slightly furtive letter to his father, written from Bristol, told Albert Lewis only part of the story.146 Lewis had developed “a cold,” and Mrs. Moore had sent him to bed.

  For things had clearly moved on. On his return to Crownhill, Lewis wrote a hasty letter to Arthur Greeves, asking him to disregard certain things he had unwisely said about “a certain person.”147 Although the circumstantial evidence is strong that this is a reference to his growing intimacy with Mrs. Moore, it is not absolutely conclusive. Still, it fits a growing picture of deception and intrigue, by which Lewis sought to conceal this problematic yet special relationship from his father. Lewis was perfectly aware that if Albert Lewis were ever to learn the truth, their own relationship—already strained—could be totally ruptured. What if his father were to see Lewis’s letter to Greeves of 14 December 1917, in which he explicitly referred to Greeves and Mrs. Moore as “the two people who matter most . . . in the world”?148

  Deployment to France: November 1917

  Paddy Moore was sent to France with the Rifle Brigade in October. Both Lewis and his father feared that Lewis would also be deployed to fight in France. Yet suddenly, everything changed. Lewis wrote to his father in “great excitement” on 5 November: he had just heard that his battalion was to be deployed to Ireland!149 Political tensions in Ireland were high, partly on account of the simmering aftermath of the Easter Rising. While this posting would not be without its dangers, Albert Lewis could hardly have failed to recognise that an Irish posting would be far less hazardous than the front line in France. In the end, the 3rd Somerset moved to the Irish city of Londonderry in November 1917, and then to Belfast in April 1918.

  But Lewis did not move with them after all. He had been transferred to the 1st Somerset,150 a combat regiment which had been stationed in France since August 1914.151 The expectation was that the new recruits would be undergoing extensive further training before going into action. But again, things began to move very quickly. In the early evening of Thursday, 15 November, Lewis urgently telegraphed his father. He had been given forty-eight hours’ leave before he had to report to Southampton for disembarkation to France. He was now in Bristol, staying with Mrs. Moore. Could his father come and visit him?152 Albert Lewis wired back: he didn’t understand what Lewis meant. Could he write and explain?

  Lewis frantically wired his father again on the morning of Friday, 16 November. He had been ordered to France and was due to sail the following afternoon. He needed to know if his father could visit him before he left. Yet like the silent heaven against which Lewis protested in his poetry, Albert Lewis failed to reply. In the end, Lewis sailed for France without being able to say farewell to his father. The casualty rates among inexperienced junior officers were appallingly high. Lewis might never return. Albert Lewis’s failure to appreciate the importance of that critical moment did nothing to mend his troubled relationship with his son. Some would say it ruptured it completely.

  On 17 November, Lewis sailed from Southampton to Le Havre in Normandy to join his regiment. On his nineteenth birthday, Lewis was transferred, friendless, to the trenches near Monchy-le-Preux, east of the French town of Arras, close to the border with Belgium. Albert Lewis, meanwhile, tried yet again to get Lewis transferred to an artillery regiment. However, he was advised that only Lewis himself could request such a transfer, and this would require Lewis’s commanding officer’s permission in writing.153 In a letter written from what Lewis describes as “a certain rather battered town somewhere behind the line,” he rejected this possibility.154 He would rather stay with his infantry regiment.

  Although Lewis’s letter of 13 December suggests that he was safely behind the front line, this was not the case. In fact, Lewis was already in the trenches, although he withheld this information in his correspondence with his father until 4 January 1918, presumably to shield him from anxiety. Even then, Lewis played down the danger of his situation. He reported that he was in danger only once —a shell had fallen near him, and that was when he was using the latrines.155

  Lewis’s scant references to the horrors of trench warfare confirm both its objective realities (“the horribly smashed men still moving like half-crushed beetles, the sitting or standing corpses, the landscape of sheer earth without a blade of grass”) and his own subjective distancing of himself from this experience (it “shows rarely and faintly in memory” and is “cut off from the rest of my experience”).156 This is perhaps the most distinctive feature of Lewis’s “treaty with reality”—the construction of a frontier, a barrier, which protected Lewis from such shocking images as “horribly smashed men,” and allowed him to continue his life as if these horrors had been experienced by someone else. Lewis spun a cocoon around himself, insulating his thoughts from rotting corpses and the technology of destruction. The world could be kept at bay—and this was best done by reading, and allowing the words and thoughts of others to shield him from what was going on around him.

  Lewis’s experience of this most technological and impersonal of wars was filtered and tempered through a literary prism. For Lewis, books were both a link to the remembered—if sentimentally exaggerated—bliss of a lost past and a balm for the trauma and hopelessness of the present. As he wrote to Arthur Greeves several months later, he looked back wistfully to happier days, in which he sat surrounded by his “little library and browsed from book to book.”157 Those days, he reflected with obvious sadness, were gone.

  Clement Attlee, a University College undergraduate who later became British prime minister, calmed his nerves under shell fire in the Great War by imagining himself taking a walk through Oxford.158 Lewis preferred to read books to achieve the same outcome. Yet Lewis did more than read—though he read voraciously—while on active service in France. He also wrote poems. His cycle Spirits in Bondage includes a group of poems that clearly are a response to the directly experienced realities of war—such as “French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux).” Lewis had discovered the calming and coping impact, not merely of reading literature, but of putting his feelings into his own words. It was as if the mental process of forging sentences tempered and tamed the emotions that originally inspired them. As he once advised his confidant Arthur Greeves, “Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”159

  For most of February 1918, Lewis was hospitalised in No. 10 British Red Cross Hospital at Le Tréport, not far from Dieppe on the French coast. Like so many others, he was suffering from “trench fever,” often referred to as P. O. U. (“pyrexia origin unknown”), a condition widely believed to be spread by lice. Lewis wrote home to his father, recalling a happier time spent with his mother and brother at Berneval-le-Grand near Dieppe, only eighteen miles (29 kilometres) away, in 1907.160 His letters to Greeves from around this time are packed with news of books he had been reading, or intended to read—such as Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography. If the gods were kind to him, he remarked, he might have a relapse and have to stay in the hospital longer. But, he wryly remarked, the gods hated hi
m. And who could blame them, given the way he felt about them?161 A week later, Lewis was out of the hospital. His company was moved out of the battle zone for further training at Wanquetin, practising the technique of “section rushes” in preparation for a major assault that was being planned, before moving back to the front line at Fampoux near Arras on 19 March.

  Wounded in Battle: The Assault on Riez du Vinage, April 1918

  Arthur Greeves’s diary for the months of March and April makes frequent reference to his own loneliness and his anxieties for Lewis. “I pray God to preserve my boy. I don’t know what I should do without him.”162 On 11 April 1918, Greeves recorded the contents of a letter he had just received from Mrs. Moore: her “dear son” had been “killed.”163 Greeves was distraught with grief over Paddy Moore and growing fears for the safety of his closest friend. Two days later, he confided his hope for Lewis: “If only Jack could get wounded. He is in God’s hands and I trust in Him to keep him safe.”164 Greeves’s deepest hope was that Lewis would be wounded severely enough to be taken out of the front lines, or possibly even brought home to England. In the end, that was precisely what happened.

  The Somerset Light Infantry began their assault on the small, German-held village of Riez du Vinage at 6.30 p.m. on 14 April. The British heavy artillery laid down a creeping barrage, behind which the infantry advanced.165 The barrage was not sufficiently intense to suppress German resistance, and the advancing infantry came under heavy machine-gun fire. One of those wounded was Second Lieutenant Laurence Johnson, who died the following morning. Johnson, a scholar of Queen’s College, Oxford, had joined up on 17 April 1917 and had become one of Lewis’s few friends in the army.166