C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Heinemann said, ‘Of course, Mr Lewis, we never accept poetry unless it is really good.’

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Whether this was an attempt to convince himself, or whether Heinemann really meant it, we shall never know. The publishers not only accepted Spirits in Prison for publication; they also assured Lewis that John Galsworthy, the novelist and author of The Forsyte Saga, would give it some publicity in his magazine Reveille, in which a selection of work by contemporary poets was promised. ‘You’ll be in very good company,’ Evans assured Lewis, ‘for we have poems by Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves in the same number.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Actually, much to Lewis’s chagrin, Galsworthy decided not to include any of Lewis’s poems in the next number of Reveille, so clearly not everyone shared Heinemann’s glowing opinion of the young poet.

Albert Lewis was proud, but he did not allow paternal pride to blind him to the poor quality of the work. He said that ‘for a first book – and of poetry – written by a boy not yet twenty it is an achievement. Of course we must not expect too much from it.’ That would seem to be the sanest judgement of the book that there is. Albert, the catholic and voracious reader, also pointed out to his son that there was already a novel by Robert Hichens called Spirits in Prison and that he would do well to choose a different title. It was duly changed to Spirits in Bondage. Lewis did not publish it under his own name, but under that of Clive Hamilton – his own first name and his mother’s surname. Nevertheless, by some absurd oversight, he appeared in the Heinemann catalogue as George S. Lewis. Galsworthy did eventually relent, and in the February 1919 issue of Reveille he published Lewis’s poem ‘Death in Battle’. The book had the quietest, tamest of receptions, much to the poet’s disappointment, but this did nothing to diminish his sense that a poet, first and foremost, was what he was.

In November 1918, the dread that he might be transported from Eastbourne back to the Western Front was lifted. The Armistice was signed. ‘It is almost incredible that the war is over, isn’t it?’ he wrote to Greeves. ‘Not to have that “going back” hanging over my head all the time.’ Holidays with no school term to cloud them, the condition of being perpetually at home, these were to become images in his mind of the heavenly places. Life was returning to normal. He spent Christmas in Ulster, but in an important sense Belfast was not any longer home. When he resumed his undergraduate career at Oxford in the new year, he did not go alone.

–SEVEN– UNDERGRADUATE 1919–1922 (#ulink_303656cb-33f1-5e38-86fa-c7c6019b2b40)

Lewis returned to University College, Oxford, in January 1919. Because of his experiences in the war, he was excused the matriculation requirements, Responsions and Divinity. Had he chosen to do so, he could also have dispensed with the first of his public examinations, Honour Moderations, ‘Mods’ (that is to say, Latin and Greek Literature), and proceeded straight to the second part of the Classics course, Ancient History and Philosophy (Literae Humaniores, or Greats). He had decided, however, upon an academic career, and was advised that for this he would do better to take the whole course.

Many of the books, perhaps most of them, that he was studying for Mods were already familiar to him. Being a naturally fluent reader with a brilliant teacher in W. T. Kirkpatrick, he would probably have been equipped to get a good mark in Mods in his last month at Great Bookham. The first four terms of his Oxford life were therefore a delightful opportunity to taste again, and at greater leisure, at familiar wells. For example, at Gastons, he had read through the Bacchae of Euripides in Greek and compared it with the poetic English rendering, which he much admired, of Gilbert Murray. At Oxford, he had the chance to attend lectures on the Bacchae by Murray himself – the brilliant young Australian who had become a Professor of Greek at Glasgow in his early twenties and had now returned to his old university to occupy the Regius Chair of Greek. ‘He is a real inspiration,’ Lewis wrote, ‘quite as good as his best books, if only he did not dress so horribly, worse even than most dons.’

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Other intellectual stimulation came from his membership of an undergraduate society called the Martlets, a group that met once a week in term-time to discuss a subject of common interest and hear one of their members read a paper. An essay which particularly took Lewis’s fancy was one on the poetry of Henry Newbolt, read by a man called Basil Wyllie. ‘I hadn’t thought the subject very promising but he quoted a great many good things I hadn’t known – especially a queer little song about grasshoppers.’

(#litres_trial_promo) When we follow Lewis’s reading over his first couple of terms, it is sometimes hard to remember that he is at this point studying Latin and Greek rather than English Literature. Gibbon, Shakespeare’s King John and Troilus and Cressida (‘a very good play’), Layamon’s Brut and Wace in the Everyman translation and an unnamed book of philosophy which took him eight weeks to read were all devoured in his first term, on top of his Latin and Greek authors. ‘Of course there is very little time for ordinary reading, which has to be confined to the week-end as it was at Kirk’s.’

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They were happy days, spent basking in the pleasures of peacetime, the beauty of the college buildings and, as spring turned into summer, the beauty of Oxford itself.

‘It is perfectly lovely now both in town and country – there are such masses of fruit trees all white,’ he wrote in June 1919.

One big cherry tree stands in the Master’s garden just below my windows and a brisk wind this morning has shaken down masses of leaves that lay like snowflakes on the bright smooth grass. Then beyond the lawn you see the gable end of the chapel. I usually go and bathe before breakfast now at a very nice place up the Cherwell called ‘Parsons Pleasure’. I always swim (on chest) down to a bend, straight towards the sun, see some hills in the distance across the water, then turn and come again to land going on my back and looking up at the willow trees above me.

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As if the pleasures of mind and sense were not enough, he was also expanding his circle of friendship. Eric Dodds, his fellow-Irishman, destined one day to succeed Gilbert Murray as Regius Professor of Greek, was Lewis’s exact contemporary at Univ. They differed radically over the Irish question – Dodds being a fanatical Home Ruler who refused to stand up for the National Anthem; but they liked each other and were stimulated by each other’s company. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, later to be known as an authority on Cornwall, was another friend made at this juncture. ‘I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment, in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most wet and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge.’ Another friend met in his first year of residence at Univ was Owen Barfield, an undergraduate at Wadham College. The First Friend, Lewis believed, is like Arthur Greeves, the man who becomes an alter ego and who shares your tastes. ‘But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Lewis was to say that Barfield changed him a good deal more than he did Barfield, and this was probably true. The thing they disagreed about most forcefully was religion, Barfield being set on the course which was to lead him to embrace theosophy, and Lewis at this stage still being an ardent atheist.

Lewis appeared to be enjoying an archetypal undergraduate career in ancient and beautiful surroundings. But in fact his routines were completely different from those of his fellow-collegians. True, he rose at six-thirty, bathed, attended chapel (which was still compulsory for undergraduates) and had his breakfast in hall. Then he went to lectures and libraries and tutorials, and had lunch (bread, cheese and beer) brought over to his room by a college servant. But at 1 p.m. without fail, he got on his bicycle and pedalled over Magdalen Bridge, up Headington Hill and into the dingy little suburban thoroughfare near the mental hospital. There at Number 28 Warneford Road, in the house of a lady of High Church persuasion by the name of Featherstone, Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen had taken up their abode. ‘They are installed in our “own hired house” (like St. Paul only not daily preaching and teaching). The owner of the house has not yet cleared out and we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room.’

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It is the ‘we’ in this paragraph from a letter to Arthur Greeves which must give the reader pause. Lewis is now twenty years old, and dependent (in those days before university grants) on an allowance from his father. This allowance was meant to cover the expenses of one young man living in college. Instead, it was made to stretch (in those months when cheques were not forthcoming from the Beast) to pay the rent for Mrs Moore and her daughter. Here was a commitment indeed.

Nor was it merely a financial one. From the very beginning of his relationship with Janie Moore, Lewis involved himself in all her domestic arrangements – the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, as well as the schoolwork of the little girl. ‘He’s as good as an extra maid,’

(#litres_trial_promo) Mrs Moore once said of him. Moreover, because the arrangement was so makeshift, there was no permanence in any of the domestic arrangements which they made. They lived from hand to mouth. Between 1918 and 1923 they had nine different addresses, traipsing disconsolately from one set of rented rooms to the next, and always finding something wrong when they got there. Some places objected to Maureen’s noisy music practice. Some were by their nature temporary. In others doubts were cast on the relationship between Mrs Moore and her ‘adopted son’ and they moved on to avoid scandal.

For all this domestic life of Lewis’s in his undergraduate days had to remain a closely guarded secret. Nowadays, nearly all the colleges in Oxford are open to both sexes, and no disgrace attaches to the two sexes consorting together. Things were very different until at least 1960. In 1919, the older dons could just about remember the days when college fellows had to be celibate. Even though marriage was now permitted them, an atmosphere of celibacy prevailed. Scholars of colleges were under an obligation of celibacy. Nor was this entirely a formality. Failure to attend breakfast in your college could result in being ‘gated’, that is confined to the college for a period of anything from a week to a term. To have slept out of college was a very serious offence. To be shown to have associated with a member of the opposite sex was yet more serious. Six years after Lewis began his career at Univ, another poet whose first volume had been published before he arrived at Oxford was rusticated – sent away for a term – because of his association with a married woman in Maidenhead.’ “I hope, Mr. Quennell, you do not know as much about Mrs. X as we do,” remarked the Vice Chancellor with a gently dismissive sigh … The Oxford I knew was still a semi-monastic institution; some of the dons clearly detested women; and the only kind of moral offence they condoned were discreetly managed homosexual passions.’

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If Lewis’s domestic arrangements had been known to the college authorities or to the Vice-Chancellor of the University, there is no doubt at all that they would have been considered most irregular. True, there had been oddities before in the history’ of the University. John Ruskin’s mother had taken up residence in the High Street when he was an undergraduate at Christ Church. Robert Hawker, the future vicar of Morwenstowe and author of ‘And Shall Trelawney Die’, had arrived to be an undergraduate as a married man (as it happened to a woman twenty years his senior). But Mrs Moore was neither Lewis’s wife nor his mother, and though she may have been something just as innocent, it would have put his entire career in jeopardy had the authorities known about her. He would certainly never have had any hope of a college fellowship; even in the 1950s, Oxford dons who were deemed to have led irregular lives with the opposite sex found themselves ‘resigning’ their fellowships.

They were jealous of their time together. In early days, there was a significant little quarrel between Maureen Moore, her mother and Lewis. An unshakable part of the Sunday routine was that Maureen should be sent out to church in the morning, leaving her mother and Lewis for a precious hour together on their own. She did not much enjoy going and had from the first resented her mother’s being prepared to allow life to revolve around Jack. Maureen’s life had never been stable, but since Lewis had come on the scene, what stability it once possessed had been lost for ever. Since 1919, she had been moved from school to school, and from lodging house to lodging house: Bristol, Eastbourne, London, Oxford. Her mother was prepared to take her anywhere, so long as she could be near Jack.

One week, she decided to rebel against the church routine. Why should she always go to church alone? Her mother and Jack never went to church. She refused to go. Their reaction was vehement. She must go out and leave them alone. Unwillingly, furiously, she went. In later years, when Lewis himself had become a regular churchgoer, Maureen wistfully looked back on this apparent over-reaction and wondered if it was the beginning of his return to the practice of Christianity. As a child, it did not occur to her to ask why a young man might wish sometimes to be left alone with her mother.

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In addition to what Maureen, or Oxford, might make of the relationship between Lewis and Mrs Moore, there was the question of what Belfast would make of it. Although Lewis did his best to conceal from his father the full extent of his involvement with Mrs Moore, Albert was no fool; and as a police-court solicitor he naturally viewed the thing in a lurid light.

‘If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind-hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill I should not be so uneasy,’ he wrote to Warnie. ‘Then there is the husband who I have always been told is a scoundrel – but the absent are always to blame – somewhere in the background, who some of these days might try a little aimiable [sic] blackmailing.’

(#litres_trial_promo) Warnie, when he got this letter, was ‘greatly relieved to hear that Mrs. Moore HAS a husband’. He made two sound points in reply to his father’s fears. ‘(1) Mrs. Moore can’t marry Jacks (2) Mr. Moore can’t blackmail him because “IT” hasn’t enough money to make it a paying risk.’

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Jack, for his part, felt an intense awkwardness about the fact that he had, in effect, cut loose from home and thrown in his lot with Mrs Moore and Maureen. Guilt made him hostile, and the more conscious he became that his father disapproved of the Mrs Moore set-up, the more venomous his hostility became. ‘Haven’t heard from my esteemed parent for some time; has he committed suicide yet?’ he asked Greeves in one letter of June 1919, and in July he wrote, ‘I hope you are avoiding my father as much as possible.’

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As the summer term at University College came to an end, the question had naturally arisen of where, and with whom, Jack would spend the Long Vacation (from June until October). He wanted to be with Mrs Moore, but could not admit the extent of his involvement with her. Why could he not come to Ireland as usual? was the cunning request of both Albert and Warnie, neither of whom liked the sound of Mrs Moore at all. Jack parried, ‘Where could you pass your holiday better than in Oxford? The three of us could certainly spend our afternoons in a punt under the willows at least as comfortably as we did at Dunbar and the Mitre, honoured with so many famous ghosts, would be an improvement on the Railway Hotel.’

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He felt torn. He both did, and did not, want to admit to himself that the childhood days at Little Lea had come to an end. In the event the vacation was a compromise, with Jack moving to and fro between his two homes, trying in each to pretend that the other did not exist. At the end of July, he and Warnie made a visit to Gastons to see the Kirkpatricks, and on their way back stayed in London to see a show – The Maid of the Mountains, with Bertram Wallis and José Collins. They then went back to Ireland together. In spite of various happy outings with their mother’s relations, the Ewarts and the Hamiltons (and a jaunt to Island Magee), the atmosphere at home was tense. A major quarrel developed between Jack and his father, and by the end of August Jack had returned to Oxford to reside in ‘lodgings’ – Uplands, Windmill Road, Headington – with Mrs Moore and Maureen. The quarrel rumbled on by letter throughout the late summer and early autumn. ‘I must ask you’, Jack implored, ‘to believe that it would have been easier for me to have left those things unsaid. They were as painful to me as they were to you.’

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It would be fascinating to know from Jack’s tutors at University College how much any of these tensions were reflected either in his work or in his general demeanour during tutorials and at college meals. But no such record survives. All we know is that by the spring of 1920 he was ready to sit Honour Moderations, and to be placed very surely in the First Class. ‘I was very sorry to hear that I had allowed you first to learn the news about Mods from a stranger,’ he wrote home to his father. ‘I had put off writing until I was clear of Oxford.’

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This letter, like nearly all the letters he wrote to his father at this period, reflects an agony of guilt about their quarrel and separation. The guilt was something which he was never, quite, able to expunge. He always regarded this spell of angry estrangement from Albert as ‘the blackest chapter of my life’.

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‘Clear of Oxford’ in that last letter meant that he was enjoying a walking holiday in Somerset ‘with a friend’. The friend, of course, was Mrs Moore. By the end of his next term, when he had started to study ancient history and philosophy for Greats, Lewis was completely wrapped up in a happy combination of academic work and domestic absorption in Mrs Moore’s doings and affairs. Ireland, which was in the grip of a civil war which threatened to destroy the entire Protestant population, seemed remote during the happy Oxford summer of 1920. ‘I cannot understand the Irish news at all,’ he wrote airily.

(#litres_trial_promo) This was the period when he came closest to an estrangement not only from the P’daytabird, but also from his beloved brother Warnie. Snatching a bit of leave from the Army, Warnie arrived in Oxford and was surprised to read, ‘I am afraid this is rather an unfortunate day for you to come up as I am taking a child’ (Maureen, of course) ‘to a matinee and shall not therefore be able to see you until rather late.’ This from his closest companion and friend. No feeling of apology accompanied this note, left at Warnie’s hotel, because by now Jack took it for granted that Mrs Moore and her family took precedence over everything. He added insult to injury by saying ‘another time if possible you should warn me for duty earlier.’ Seeing his brother had become a ‘duty’.

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Warnie was nevertheless insistent about keeping open lines of communication with Jack, and in September 1920 he made Jack come on holiday with him to Ulster. Dreadful rows took place during this time between Jack and his father. When the boy had gone back to Oxford his father licked his wounds in the pages of his diary.

I still think I was very badly – not to say insultingly and contemptuously treated by Jacks. It is questionable whether I did a wise thing in submitting as I did, but it would have made me miserable for the rest of my life to have had an open rupture and forbidden him the house. But such weakness with some natures is traded upon and made to justify further insult and disrespect.

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