C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 9
Lewis, however, reached Riez du Vinage safely with his company. “I ‘took’ about sixty prisoners—that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-gray figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere, all had their hands up.”167 By 7.15 p.m., the action was over. Riez du Vinage was in the hands of the Somerset Light Infantry.
The Germans immediately mounted a counterattack, initially by shelling the village, and then by launching an infantry assault, which was repelled. A German shell exploded close to Lewis, wounding him and killing Sergeant Harry Ayres, who was standing next to him at the time.168 Lewis was taken to No. 6 British Red Cross Hospital near Etaples. A letter, presumably written by a nurse, was sent immediately to Albert Lewis, informing him that his son was “slightly wounded.” This was followed by a similar telegram from the War Office: “2nd Lt. C. S. Lewis Somerset Light Infantry wounded April fifteenth.”169
Albert Lewis, however, seems to have persuaded himself that his son was severely wounded, and wrote to Warnie—by then promoted to the rank of captain170—expressing his distress. Warnie, alarmed that his seriously wounded brother might not survive for long, set out to visit him immediately. But how was he to get there? His brother was fifty miles (80 kilometres) away.
Warnie’s military record helps us understand what happened next. An examining officer responsible for assessing Warnie’s promotion prospects around this time declared that he was “NOT a good horseman,” but he was nevertheless “a keen motor-cyclist.” In a move that was at one and the same time predictable and imaginative, Warnie borrowed a motorbike and drove nonstop over rough terrain to see his brother in the field hospital. He was reassured to find that his brother was not in danger.171
In fact, Lewis had suffered a shrapnel wound that was sufficiently serious to merit his being sent back to England, but not life threatening—what many in the army then termed a “Blighty wound.” Lewis had suffered lightly in comparison with others; shortly afterwards, he finally learned that his friend Paddy Moore was missing, believed dead.
It was at this time that Greeves wrote to Lewis, confiding that he realised he was probably homosexual, something Lewis had most likely already guessed.172 Lewis’s response to Greeves’s confession shows a surprising tolerance towards this development, linked with a suspicion of traditional moral values: “Congratulations old man. I am delighted that you have had the moral courage to form your own opinions
So did Greeves have hopes that Lewis might share his sexual orientation? It is important to realise that Greeves’s diary around this time indicates a deep emotional attachment to Lewis, which is without parallel elsewhere in Greeves’s life. To judge by his diary entries, no other figure—male or female—plays such a significant role in his life, even though Lewis is physically absent for most of the time. When Lewis fails to write to him, Greeves sinks into despair. “Feel so unhappy regarding Jack, is he sick of me? Never a word from him.”175 His final entry for 1918 is particularly revealing: “What would I do without J[ack]?”176 The evidence clearly suggests—but does not prove—that the chief object of Greeves’s affections was Lewis himself.
This could easily have become a serious problem for the two young men. In the end, Greeves appears to have accepted the realities of the situation. Any awkwardness between the two on this point appears to have evaporated with relative ease, and did not become an issue of contention between them.177 Lewis continued to regard Greeves as his confidant and closest friend at this time, and remained in touch with him until weeks before his death in 1963. Yet Lewis’s complex relationship with Greeves clearly had an impact on Lewis’s reflections on the focus and limits of friendship. It is important for readers of The Four Loves (1960) to appreciate that Lewis is here exploring, among other matters, the boundaries of intimacy, affection, and respect within male relationships.
Meanwhile, Lewis returned to England and became a patient at the Endsleigh Palace Hospital for Officers on 25 May 1918. This building was originally a London hotel, which had been requisitioned by the War Office to cope with the stream of wounded officers returning home from France. Lewis was well enough to be able to go to the opera (he tells Arthur Greeves of his delight at a performance of Wagner’s Valkyrie), and to travel to Great Bookham to visit the “Great Knock.” Lewis penned a long and affectionate letter to his father, describing this “pilgrimage,” and inviting him to come and visit him in London.178 Albert Lewis, however, never visited his son during his convalescence.179 But Mrs. Moore did. In fact, she moved out of Bristol to be with him.
Lewis and Mrs. Moore: An Emerging Relationship
So what was going on between Lewis and Mrs. Moore? Several factors must be taken into account in trying to reach some kind of understanding about the situation. First, we have no documents, including records of personal testimony, which allow us to reach reliable conclusions. Late in life Mrs. Moore destroyed her letters from Lewis. The only other person Lewis would have confided in about his relationship would have been Arthur Greeves. Again, we have no evidence from this source casting unambiguous light on this question.
We do, however, understand something of the context against which this relationship developed. We know that Lewis had lost his mother, and thus needed maternal affection and understanding at a difficult time in his life, when he was away from home and friends. Furthermore, he was preparing to go to war, facing possible death. Studies of the Great War emphasise its subversive impact on British social and moral conventions around this time. Young men about to go to the Front were the object of sympathy for women, old and young, which often led to passionate—yet generally ephemeral—affairs. Lewis, as his letters to Arthur Greeves indicate, was a sexually inquisitive young man. We are perfectly entitled to wonder what Mrs. Moore was doing in Lewis’s rooms in University College in 1917—a memory that Lewis so clearly cherished, to judge by his diary entry of 1922.
It is possible that Mrs. Moore fused Lewis’s idealised notions of women as the caring, supportive, empathetic mother on the one hand, and the exciting lover on the other. I have often been struck by what many regard as the most haunting of C. S. Lewis’s poems—the sonnet titled “Reason,” probably written in the early 1920s. Lewis here contrasts the clarity and strength of reason (symbolised by Athene, the “maid” of the poem) with the warm darkness and creativity of the imagination (Demeter, the earth-mother). For Lewis, the big question is this: Is there anyone who can be “both maid and mother” to him?180
Who indeed could achieve such a fusion, reconciling what many would see as polar opposites? At the intellectual level, Lewis was searching for a true marriage of reason and imagination—something that eluded him totally as a young man. It seemed to him then that his life of the mind was split into two disconnected hemispheres. “On the one side a many-islanded sea of poetry and myth; on the other a glib and shallow ‘rationalism.’”181 Lewis’s later discovery of the Christian faith offered him a synthesis of reason and imagination which he found persuasive and authentic till the end of his life.
Might there be a deeper meaning to Lewis’s imagery and words here, whether Lewis intended them or not? Might there be a hint at Lewis’s desire for a woman who would nourish both his mind and his body? Was Mrs. Moore both the “mother” that Lewis had lost and the “maid” for whom he yearned?
What can be said with some confidence is that the circumstantial evidence suggests that Lewis developed a complex relationship with Mrs. Moore in the summer of 1917. George Sayer (1914–2005), a close friend of Lewis’s who is widely regarded as one of his most insightful biographers, initially regarded their relationship as ambivalent but ultimately platonic. Older stud
ies sympathetic to Lewis—including Sayer’s important and relatively recent study Jack (1988)—considered and rejected the possibility that Lewis and Mrs. Moore were lovers. Yet the tide of opinion has changed. Sayer himself illustrates this shifting consensus. In a revised introduction to later editions of this work, written in 1996, Sayer stated that he was now “quite certain” that Lewis and Mrs. Moore had been lovers, and furthermore argued that this development was “not surprising,” given Lewis’s deep and unresolved emotional needs and conflicts at this time.182 Yet their relationship cannot really be described as merely “sexual,” if this is understood to define its focus and limits. Rather, it appears to have been strongly shaped by both maternal and romantic factors.
What is difficult to understand is perhaps not why such a relationship developed immediately before Lewis went to the Front, possibly never to return, but why this relationship continued for so long afterwards. Most wartime affairs of this kind were short lived (often because of the death of the departing soldier in battle), and were generally based on sympathy and expediency, rather than being more deeply rooted in personal affection and trust. It seems likely that the “pact” between Lewis and Paddy Moore is important in understanding the nature of this relationship. This established a context within which this relationship could be rationalised to outsiders, and likely gave some form of moral justification to Lewis himself. Lewis had no Christian beliefs at this stage, and clearly regarded himself as free to establish such values and practices as he saw fit. We shall return to this matter in the following chapter.
On 25 June 1918, Lewis was moved to Ashton Court, a convalescent hospital in Clifton, Bristol, close to Mrs. Moore’s home. Lewis wrote to his father, explaining that he had tried to find a suitable hospital in Ireland, but none had been available.183 It was here that he initially learned that his Spirits in Prison (as it was then titled) had been refused for publication by Macmillan, and subsequently that it had been accepted by Heinemann. At this stage, Lewis proposed to publish under the pen name “Clive Staples.” On 18 November, he changed this to “Clive Hamilton,” drawing on his mother’s maiden name to conceal his identity.184 The book would be published in March 1919.
In the meantime, Lewis was transferred to Perham Downs Camp on Salisbury Plain on 4 October. Mrs. Moore duly followed him, renting rooms in a nearby cottage. Lewis here enjoyed the unusual luxury of having a room to himself. On 11 November, the Great War finally came to an end. Lewis was transferred again—this time to an Officers Command Depot in Eastbourne, in Sussex. Again, Mrs. Moore followed him. Lewis informed his father of this arrangement—it was no longer a matter he regarded as secret—and announced that he was due some leave from 10 to 22 January, when he would come over to Belfast. Warnie, who was also due some leave from soldiering in France, arrived in Belfast on 23 December 1918, in time to celebrate Christmas with his father.
Then things moved with unexpected pace. Lewis was discharged from the hospital and demobilised on 24 December. Unable to alert his family in advance to his changed circumstances, he made his way home to Belfast unannounced. Warnie’s diary entry for 27 December takes up the story:185
A red letter day today. We were sitting in the study about 11 o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jacks! He has been demobilized. . . . We had lunch and then all three went for a walk. It was as if the evil dream of four years had passed away and we were still in 1915.
On 13 January 1919, Lewis returned to Oxford to resume his studies at Oxford University, so cruelly interrupted by the Great War. He would remain there for the next thirty-five years.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
1919–1927
Deceptions and Discoveries: The Making of an Oxford Don
With the ending of the Great War, Oxford was flooded with new students. More than 1,800 ex-servicemen either began or resumed their studies in the first year after the war ended. One of them was C. S. Lewis, who returned to Oxford to take up his scholarship at University College on 13 January 1919. To his surprise, the college porter—almost certainly the legendary Fred Bickerton186—recognised him immediately, and took him straight back to his old rooms in Radcliffe Quadrangle from the summer of 1917. Oxford University made a significant concession to their admission requirements in response to the postwar influx of students with military or naval service. Having served as a commissioned officer in the British army, Lewis found that he was now exempt from the prewar requirement to pass Responsions.187 His lack of basic mathematical skills would no longer stand in his way to an Oxford degree.
Lewis had already fallen in love with Oxford, on account of both its stunning architecture and its rich intellectual heritage. It was a city based on culture and learning, not on Britain’s imperial exploitation of its colonies nor industrial desecration of the local landscape. As Lewis put it in Spirits in Bondage, Oxford was one of the few great cities
That was not built for gross, material gains,
Sharp, wolfish power or empire’s glutted feast.
For Lewis the undergraduate, as for the later Lewis, Oxford was a beautiful city that encouraged and affirmed the empires of the mind. It was
A clean, sweet city lulled by ancient streams,
A place of visions and of loosening chains,
A refuge of the elect, a tower of dreams.188
For Lewis, those visions and dreams were best fostered and nourished by returning to the fountainhead of Western civilization—the culture of ancient Greece and Rome. As part of the process of the “expansion of his mind,” Lewis would immerse himself in the languages and literature of the classical age.
The Student of Classics: University College, 1919
Lewis had already made the all-important decision that he wanted to pursue an academic career at Oxford.189 There really was no plan B. Lewis knew what he wanted to be, and the demands that this career choice would make of him. He had chosen to study classical languages and literature, referred to in Oxford as Literae Humaniores. This was the diamond in Victorian Oxford’s academic crown, and was still seen as the intellectual flagship of Oxford’s undergraduate academic degrees up to about 1920.
4.1 Radcliffe Quadrangle, University College, as photographed by Henry W. Taunt (1860–1922) in the summer of 1917. Lewis was given a set of rooms in this quadrangle on his arrival at University College in April 1917, and returned to those same rooms in January 1919.
In 1912, William Archibald Spooner (1844–1930), the celebrity classical scholar and Warden of New College, Oxford—whose fame may have led Lewis to apply originally to New College—summed up the purpose of Literae Humaniores as an “immersion in the civilization and thought of the ancient world.” Often abbreviated as Lit. Hum., this Latin term is not easily rendered into English. Literally translated as “more humane letters,” it alludes to the Renaissance humanist vision of an enlarging and civilizing education, brought about through a direct engagement with the riches of the intellectual and cultural past.
Although the origins of Literae Humaniores at Oxford can be traced back to 1800, its social roots lie firmly in the concerns of the earlier eighteenth century. England had emerged, badly bruised yet not destroyed, from the civil war and revolution of the seventeenth century. Every effort was made to reconstitute a stable social order within the nation by emphasising the virtues of reason, nature, and order. The classical age was seen as a rich source of wisdom to enable the English to consolidate political and social stability, and encourage the emergence of shared cultural standards and norms.
Oxford undergraduates studying Literae Humaniores were required to engage directly with the literary, philosophical, and historical riches of the classical age in the original languages—not simply as a subject of academic interest, but as a means of ensuring England’s survival and prosperity. Lit. Hum. was seen as a gateway to wisdom, rather than the mere accumulation of knowledge. It was about moral and cultural preparation for life, not simply the acquisition of factual in
formation. Where other courses of study might aim merely to fill undergraduate minds, this one set out to shape them.
Because of the considerable linguistic demands that it made of students, Lit. Hum. required four years (i.e., twelve terms) of study, whereas other courses needed a mere three. The course was divided into two parts. After five terms, students would take the examination known as “Honours Moderations” (usually abbreviated to “Mods”); if they passed this, they were then permitted to continue with the remainder of the course, universally referred to by students as “Greats,” eventually sitting for the final examination seven terms later. Each of these two examinations was “classified,” in that students would be placed in the first, second, third, or fourth class.190 Outstanding students might thus be said to have achieved a “Double First in Literae Humaniores,” meaning that they were placed in the First Class in both Moderations and Greats. It does not mean that they obtained two degrees, simply that they achieved the highest possible classification at both assessment points of this single-degree course.
Oxford’s academic year 1918–1919 was already under way when Lewis arrived. He had missed the first term of study. Oxford divided its academic year into three eight-week teaching terms: Michaelmas (usually October to early December), Hilary (January through March), and Trinity (April through June). However, having already been registered as a student at University College for the Trinity Term of 1917, Lewis was treated as a normal second-term student. He would have been behind with his Homer, but soon caught up with everyone else.