C. S. Lewis: A Biography

There can be little doubt, once he lost control and tempers flared, that Jack Lewis could take a delight in tormenting his victim. One of his more sinister dreams, recorded at about this period, was of Mrs Moore and himself in a street off the Cowley Road, one of the poorer, slummier streets in East Oxford.

We each had a man wrapped in sacking and helmeted with a biscuit tin, and we are throwing them up in the air to kill them with the fall. When that failed it became one man whom we succeeded in murdering (I am not sure how. I think by drumming his head on the pavement) and the rest of the dream consists of fearful anxiety lest we should be discovered.

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Thanks to Warnie, some semblance of a relationship between Albert and Jack was maintained. Jack went home, for example, for Christmas 1920, and accompanied his brother to church; and a flow of dutiful letters were sent back to Little Lea from Oxford.

Against this troubled emotional background, Lewis continued to read the ancient historians and the philosophers, and to see friends such as Barfield. The subject which now interested him most was philosophy; it appealed to that side of his nature which was born of the police-court solicitor and nourished at the feet of the Great Knock: the side which liked to argue, to dispute, to analyse, to indulge in intellectual cut and thrust. He began to nurse ambitions that he would become a professional philosopher and a fellow of one of the colleges. Meanwhile the side of his nature which read George MacDonald and W. B. Yeats, which saw visions and dreamed dreams, poured itself out in poetry, and he began to execute a large mythical work entitled Dymer.

His academic prowess showed no signs of waning. In the spring of 1921, he wrote an essay on Optimism, which was awarded the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize and declaimed before the assembled University grandees, Doctors, Professors and Heads of House, at the annual Encaenia in June. While he was writing the essay, he also had two memorable encounters with one of his heroes, W. B. Yeats, who had taken up residence at 4 Broad Street, Oxford.

The meetings with Yeats made a deep impression and he wrote them up for the benefit of both Arthur Greeves and his own father. He was struck by the rare, bogus-mystical ambience which the poet, then aged about sixty, had constructed around himself. Visitors were shown up a narrow staircase, lined with pictures by Blake – mainly illustrations to the Book of Job and Paradise Lost. There they found a room whose flame-coloured curtains were drawn shut, and whose only form of light derived from large, flickering six-foot candles of the kind normally seen on a church altar. Mrs Yeats reclined on a sofa, while the visitors sat around on hard upright chairs and listened to the oracular figure of Yeats himself, huge, fat, and with an affected voice which sounded almost as much French as it did Irish.

(#litres_trial_promo) ‘I understood the Dr. Johnson atmosphere for the first time – it was just like that, you know, we all sitting round, putting in judicious questions while the great man played with some old seals on his watch chain and talked.’

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On Lewis’s first visit the talk, highly uncongenial to the young atheist visitor, was all of magic and apparitions. The Jesuit Master of Campion Hall, Father Martindale, SJ, provided a skeletal presence in the flickering candlelight while Yeats prosed about the Hermetic books, lunar meditations, and the practice of magic which he said he had learnt from Bergson’s sister. It amazed Lewis the rationalist that intelligent people could be sitting about in a circle in Oxford and talking of the supernatural as if it were soberly true, and the incident was to have a deep effect on his imagination. Twenty years later, Lewis himself was to be the centre of just such a circle, discussing spirits and spiritualities with Charles Williams. Now Yeats was immediately transformed into the magician in Lewis’s own poem Dymer, and many years later Lewis drew on Yeats when he was describing the bulky mysterious figure of Merlin, the morally ambivalent wizard-ruffian of That Hideous Strength. ‘It is a pity’, Jack wrote to his father, ‘that the real romance of meeting a man who has written great poetry and who has known William Morris and Tagore and Symonds should be so overlaid with the sham romance of flame-coloured curtains and mumbo-jumbo.’

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Silliness, sham and mumbo-jumbo have never been absent from the Oxford scene. Only a few yards down the street from Yeats’s house, the Reverend Montague Summers was writing his great book about vampires (of which he claimed to have first-hand knowledge). Lewis would not have been able to echo W. H. Auden’s view of Yeats: ‘you were silly like us’. Lewis’s generation, the men who came straight back from the trenches to pursue their studies at the University, were too relieved to be alive, and too emotionally shocked, to be able to indulge in the wild, liberating silliness either of their elders, like Yeats, or of the younger generation who were about to appear in Oxford – the heroically silly generation of Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club. Lewis’s undergraduate life, even without the presence of Mrs Moore, was prosaic, almost suburban. Those who do not have the sound of exploding shells still echoing in their dreams, and the memory of decaying young corpses forever present in their memories, might well be inclined to impatience with Lewis’s cult of the ordinary. It was at this period, in some dingy room in Headington, that he laid down his book and wrote a poem which, though indefensible from an aesthetic point of view, was unquestionably written from the heart:

Thank God that there are solid folk

Who water flowers and roll the lawn

And sit and sew and talk and smoke

And snore through all the summer dawn …

Oh happy people, I have seen

No verse yet written in your praise,

And truth to tell, the time has been

I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now through weariness and strife

I learn your worthiness indeed,

The world is better for such life

As stout, suburban people lead.

The tragedy of Albert Lewis’s life was that his son had to learn this lesson not in his own suburban house at Strandtown, but in rented accommodation with his ‘adopted mother’. It has become customary for those who write about Lewis to speak of his fondness for Mrs Moore and the domestic routines in which she involved him as a tyranny which he endured with a martyr’s patience. Almost any domestic routine which involves more than one person can be viewed in this light; and it is unquestionable that Mrs Moore was a demanding companion whose desire for Lewis to be involved in the smallest detail of her life did not diminish with the years. But though she may have given him more than he bargained for, it would be unfair to her memory to deny that she was providing something which he very much needed and wanted.

Mrs Moore was demanding, but she was also generous. Much of the shopping and fetching was only necessary because she wanted to entertain and to give people meals. She was naturally gregarious. Children and animals loved her. She was spontaneously affectionate – witness the occasion when she was asked to do jury service at the Oxford Crown Court and was upbraided by the court officials for being found sitting outside in the corridor with her arm around the defendant, comforting him in his nervous sorrow. She asked much, but she also gave much. She was entirely lacking in English ‘reserve’. If one wants to know what she meant to the young Lewis one should not read only the accounts of her written by Warnie when he was a jealous, crusty bachelor and she had grown into a querulous old woman. One should read the vision in The Great Divorce of a Great Lady surrounded by a procession of angels, children and animals.

‘Who are all these young men and women on each side?’

‘They are her sons and daughters.’

‘She must have had a very large family, sir.’

‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind … Few men looked on her without becoming in a certain fashion her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true but truer to their own wives.’

‘And how … but hullo! What are all those animals? A cat, two cats – dozens of cats. And all those dogs … why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.’

‘They are her beasts.’

‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’