C. S. Lewis: A Biography

Even while Roger Lancelyn Green and I were writing this biography we knew it would someday need revising. C.S. Lewis was a prolific letter-writer and, since the book was published in 1974, many new letters have come to light. Numerous reminiscences by former students and others have also been published since that time. Besides this, a new generation of Lewis readers was coming along, and we knew that, besides incorporating much new material into our book, certain adjustments in the portrayal of Lewis and his world would be needed.

It is a matter of great sadness to me that Roger and I were not able to work on this new edition of the biography together. Roger Lancelyn Green died on 8 October 1987, and I have had to revise it by myself. Even so, I do not think my old friend would find it a very different book from the one we wrote together. We expected further information to come to light about, among other things, the Inklings, Lewis’s election to a chair at Cambridge, and his marriage to Joy Davidman, and this has meant the book has ‘grown’ by two additional chapters. Still, while I have been the sole reviser, this new edition developed out of plans Roger Lancelyn Green and I made together, and it remains as much his book as mine. We were sorry our original publisher had an aversion to footnotes; I know Roger would be glad to see references to all published and unpublished writings given in the new edition.

C.S. Lewis’s beloved brother, Warnie, died shortly before the first edition of the biography was published. If he were still alive I would thank him again for the help and encouragement he gave us. The extended treatment of the Inklings in this revised biography owes much to Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1982). I am grateful, as well, to the C.S. Lewis Company for allowing me to quote so extensively from the unpublished letters and papers of C.S. Lewis.

Many others have helped with this new book. I owe particular thanks to my co-author’s son, Richard Lancelyn Green, for sharing his father’s thoughts on C.S. Lewis and helping me in a hundred ways. Of what Lewis called ‘unambiguous debts’ those to whom I owe the most are Dr Francis Warner, Professor Emrys Jones, Dr Barbara Everett, Douglas Gresham, Dr A.J. Reyes, Dr Jeremy Dyson, Professor James Como, Dr Judith Priestman of the Bodleian Library, and my copy-editor, Steve Gove. I am grateful to Michael Ward and Scott Johnson for helping with the proofs. Finally, while this biography continues to be dedicated to C.S. Lewis and W.H. Lewis – Jack and Warnie – I offer my share in the revised book to Roger Lancelyn Green.

WALTER HOOPER

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION (#ulink_453fbe02-9785-5074-8062-a9c73d35c32a)

To write the biography of a man of genius as many-sided as C.S. Lewis is a daunting task, and it has not been undertaken lightly. His ideal biographer would have to be at once a Classical and English scholar, a theologian, a philosopher, an expert on fantasy, science fiction and children’s books – and no one but Lewis himself possessed all these qualifications in sufficient degree.

The two of us who have collaborated in the present volume fall far short of his learning, even in our own subjects: Walter Hooper is a theologian who has read English; Roger Lancelyn Green is an English scholar who has written fantasy and children’s books – both of us know and love the classical lands and have studied their literature; neither of us is a philosopher.

Why, then, are we undertaking this book? As early as May 1953 Lewis suggested to Roger Lancelyn Green that he should one day undertake his biography: when asked by his publisher Jocelyn Gibb of Geoffrey Bles Ltd to write a more formal autobiography than Surprised by Joy, Lewis replied: ‘Oh, no, but when I’m dead I suppose Roger will write my biography and Jock will publish it.’ And during the last six months of his life he was apologizing to Roger for giving Walter material which he might have thought was his special perquisite as chosen biographer.

Under these circumstances when we were approached by several of Lewis’s closest friends, including Jock Gibb, and supported by Warren Lewis, it seemed our duty, as it was our pleasure, to accept the honour, however frightening.

Our particular qualifications were fairly evenly balanced. Green had attended Lewis’s lectures, been his pupil for a B.Litt. course, and later became his friend at the time when the Narnian books were being written – a friendship that grew closer with time and with shared interests and experiences, culminating in the visit to Greece in 1960; he had also written the Bodley Head Monograph on Lewis which its subject had read in manuscript and approved, though usually averse to books about himself or other living authors.

Walter Hooper’s personal acquaintance with Lewis was shorter – fewer months indeed than Green’s years. He had already studied Lewis’s works preparatory to writing the critical volume which did not materialize, and since Lewis’s death had given much of his time to collecting and editing his miscellaneous and unpublished works, making collections of his letters or copies of them, and generally soaking himself in everything written by or about Lewis until he had become the leading authority on his life and works.

The material for any authorized biography of C.S. Lewis is immense, though singularly uneven. When the family home on the outskirts of Belfast was broken up after his father’s death in September 1929, Lewis found a gigantic mass of old letters, diaries and papers: his father seemed to have kept everything and destroyed nothing. He transported most of this to Oxford, and during the next few years his brother, Major Warren Lewis, selected and typed the larger portion, making a history of the family to the end of 1930. The ‘Lewis Papers’ takes up eleven volumes of single-spaced typing averaging 300 pages to a volume. When the typescript was completed all the original manuscripts were destroyed.

This colossal monument of paper contains many hundreds of letters from C.S. Lewis to his father, his brother, his close friend Arthur Greeves, and a few other family connections; it also includes diaries, sometimes kept with great minuteness, covering many years. After 1929 Lewis wrote no more diaries.

Thus the basic material for the first chapters of the present book was so vast that it took many months to read and sift – and many more to convert into a balanced narrative, and then cut and prune so as not to overweight this biography. Doubtless in time to come other books on C.S. Lewis will be written which will incorporate much of what we were forced to leave out: for we would like to stress that the present work is only a biography of C.S. Lewis; it was never intended to be the biography, a book which, if ever written, must still be well in the future when Lewis will have found his true level among writers and theologians.

Also, the material contained in the Lewis Papers covers the period about which Lewis had written most fully in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955) and many of the letters, with numerous extracts from the diaries, had been included by Warren Lewis in his volume of Letters of C.S. Lewis (1966), from neither of which did we wish to quote more than was necessary, or overlap except to present a rounded picture of our subject and the story of his life. The diaries and letters in the Lewis Papers, though of considerable interest, deal mainly with the simple, everyday facts of his life, and tell at great length of his adventures among books – of his vast reading and of his own early literary attempts – but surprisingly little of his inner life, his more personal experiences, or even of his spiritual pilgrimage: for almost all that we are likely to know of these we must turn to his published works, notably The Pilgrim’s Regress and Surprised by Joy.

After 1930 the material available consists mainly of letters, and recollections of Lewis’s many friends and acquaintances. Since he died at the relatively early age of sixty-four, most of these friends survived him and have supplied an almost embarrassing largesse of recollections. Indeed, only Arthur Greeves and Charles Williams, two of Lewis’s closest friends, were no longer available for consultation – and Greeves had preserved a remarkable series of letters from Lewis, mainly from the earlier part of his life, which has enriched the present volume considerably.

But Lewis had many other friends who by their age or position knew him far better than either of his present biographers could ever have done – and to these we, and our readers, owe a deep debt of gratitude. Foremost among these is Lewis’s brother, Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, who gave us full access to the Lewis Papers, many extracts from his own diary, and the benefit of his own personal recollections: and there can seldom have been two brothers so devoted to each other. It is a matter of the deepest grief and regret that Major Lewis died before this book was published, though he had read and approved all but the last chapter in manuscript.

Among the close friends of longest standing we would like in particular to thank Owen Barfield, Nevill Coghill, J.R.R. Tolkien, Colin Hardie, Gervase Mathew, Jocelyn Gibb, Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs, the late Austin and Kay Farrer, George Sayer, John Lawlor, Richard Ladborough, Adam Fox, Clifford Morris, and many less intimate acquaintances at University College and Magdalen College, Oxford, at Magdalene College, Cambridge, together with all those numerous correspondents who have placed their treasured letters from Lewis at our disposal, and have told us of their contacts with him as friends, colleagues, pupils or pen-friends. Among these we would particularly like to thank Cyril Hartmann, Laurence Whistler, Sir Donald Hardman, Miss Kaye Webb, Miss Pauline Baynes, John Wain, Derek Brewer, Arthur C. Clarke, Chad Walsh, Warfield M. Firor, and Charles Gilmore. Also the Literary Executors of the late Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, T.S. Eliot, E.R. Eddison.

Many books and articles have already appeared about C.S. Lewis as writer or religious teacher, and many more will doubtless be written. We have not attempted in this book either to criticize Lewis’s works or to assess his place in literature. Accepting that there are very many readers both young and old who consider that place to be high, and who take a natural interest in the man himself, we have sought to tell his story as best we could, to lay before them as clear a picture as we could capture of his everyday life, of his friendships and interests, and of how he came to write the books which are still claiming a wide and appreciative public in many parts of the world and particularly in Great Britain, the British Commonwealth and the United States.

Works of scholarship are superseded sooner or later, though some of Lewis’s critical and appreciative writings are likely to survive and be read with enjoyment for many years to come; new generations demand fresh approaches to the Word of God, though Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters do not seem likely to lose any of the vitality and directness of their message. As tastes in literature come and go, fade and return, the Ransom trilogy and Till We Have Faces will probably fall out of fashion, be condemned by critics and readers of a different tradition and may well be rediscovered and reinstated, perhaps even higher than anyone expects, in some future shake-up of the kaleidoscope of literature. At present the seven Chronicles of Narnia, that unexpected creation of his middle age, which are selling over a million copies a year, seem to be Lewis’s greatest claim to immortality, setting him high in that particular branch of literature in which few attain more than a transitory or an esoteric fame – somewhere on the same shelf as Lewis Carroll and E. Nesbit and George MacDonald, as Kipling and Kenneth Grahame and Andrew Lang: a branch of literature in which there are relatively few great classics but in which, as he himself said, ‘the good ones last’.

And so we offer our humble tribute to a great man, an important and interesting writer, an inspiring teacher – and above all such a friend as we are not likely to find again.

ROGER LANCELYN GREEN

WALTER HOOPER

ABBREVIATIONS (#ulink_b576a124-7483-5907-a907-1d90c2907b9a)

AMR = All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927, ed. Walter Hooper (1991)

BF = Brothers and Friends: The Diaries of Major Warren Hamilton Lewis, ed. Clyde S. Kilby and Marjorie Lamp Mead (1982)

CG = Walter Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide (1996)

FL = Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Volume I, Family Letters 1905–1931, ed. Walter Hooper (2000)

LP = unpublished ‘Lewis Papers’ or ‘Memoirs of the Lewis Family: 1850–1930’ in 11 volumes

‘Memoir’ = Memoir by W.H. Lewis contained in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis (1966), and reprinted in Letters of C.S. Lewis, ed. with a Memoir by W.H. Lewis, revised and enlarged edition, ed. Walter Hooper (1988)

SBJ = C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (1955)

TST = They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914–1963), ed. Walter Hooper (1979)

PROLOGUE ANCESTRY (#ulink_c33a98db-007b-5eda-8450-31c9e09efadc)

‘Live in Hope and die in Caergwrle’ says the pun still current in these two North Wales villages between Hawarden and Wrexham in Flintshire. C.S. Lewis’s great-great-grandfather, Richard Lewis (c. 1775–1845), fulfilled at least the second part of this dictum, though he was probably also born in Caergwrle and was certainly a farmer there for most of his life. He had one daughter and six sons, the fourth of whom, Joseph (1803?–1890) – a farmer like his father – moved some miles north-east and settled at Saltney, then still a little village just south of Chester.

The family were members of the Church of England until Joseph, thinking he was not being given the prominence that was his due in the parish, seceded and became a Methodist minister. Farming must have been merely the necessary means of supplementing the scanty tribute of his congregation, for it is as a Methodist minister that he is remembered, and in this capacity he enjoyed a considerable local reputation. Though the handwriting and letters of Joseph Lewis are not those of an educated man, it is recorded that he was an impressive speaker of an emotional type.

Of Joseph’s eight children, it is his fourth son, Richard (1832–1908), who first emigrated to Ireland, where he found work in the Cork Steamship Company as a master boiler maker. Richard was one of the working-class intelligentsia in the fore of that artisan renaissance of which the chief symptoms in the 1860s were the birth of the Trades Union and Co-operative movements. In his concern for the elevation of the working classes, he set about improving his education, and writing essays for the edification of fellow members of the Workmen’s Reading Room in the Steamship Company. Most of his essays were theological and are remarkably eloquent for a man who had had so little education. Though he had returned to the Anglican Church, his essays were sufficiently evangelical to satisfy his Methodist father.

In 1853 Richard married Martha Gee (1831–1903) of Liverpool. Their six children, Martha (1854–1860), Sarah Jane (1856?–1901), Joseph (1856–1908), William (1859–1946), Richard (b. 1861), and Albert James, were all born in Cork. Albert (1863–1929), the father of C.S. Lewis, was born on 23 August 1863, and in 1864 his father proceeded to Dublin to take up a better job. His new position was something like an ‘outside manager’ in the shipbuilding firm of Messrs Walpole, Webb and Bewly.

In 1868 Richard moved with his family to Belfast where he and John H. MacIlwaine entered into partnership, trading under the name of MacIlwaine and Lewis: Boiler Makers, Engineers, and Iron Ship Builders. The business was a success, for a time anyway, and in 1870 the Lewises moved from the area of Mount Pottinger to the more fashionable one of Lower Sydenham.

Whether it was because of his early precocity or because of the rising fortunes of the family, his father was induced to give Albert a more elaborate education than had been bestowed on his three brothers. After leaving the District Model National School he went in 1877, when he was fourteen, to Lurgan College in Co. Armagh. This was a fortunate choice and was to have far-reaching effects, for the headmaster of Lurgan College at this time was W.T. Kirkpatrick – the ‘Great Knock’ who was to play an important part in C.S. Lewis’s life, and of whom we shall hear more in the course of this narrative. Kirkpatrick was thirty-one at the time and a brilliant teacher. He seems to have taken Albert under his wing, and, once it was decided that the boy would pursue a legal career, he set about preparing him for it.

Albert left Lurgan College in 1879 and was articled the day after leaving school to the law firm of Maclean, Boyle and Maclean in Dublin. Kirkpatrick had inspired him to continue his general education, and most evenings were set aside for the study of literature, composition, logic and history. In 1881 he joined the Belmont Literary Society and was soon considered one of its best speakers. One member predicted that ‘Since Mr Lewis joined the Society his matrimonial prospects have gone up 20 per cent’,

(#ulink_68d2d02c-76a3-5792-93d3-10815c3b431a) little knowing that they had been quite high since he first met Miss Edie Macown when he went off to Lurgan. Both, it seems, were more ‘in love with love’ than with one another, and by 1884 Edie had faded out of Albert’s life.

The following year Albert qualified as a solicitor and, after a brief partnership, started a practice of his own in Belfast which he conducted with uniform success for the rest of his life.

On returning to Belfast, Albert was united not only with his family but with their neighbours, the Hamiltons. When the Lewises moved to Lower Sydenham in 1870 they had become members of the parish of St Mark’s, Dundela. Four years later the church acquired a new rector, the Reverend Thomas Hamilton. Richard Lewis was always a stern critic of Thomas Hamilton’s sermons, but the young Lewises and the young Hamiltons became warm friends immediately. Whereas the Lewises sprang from Welsh farmers and were, despite their evangelical Christianity, materially minded, the Hamiltons were a family of reputable antiquity with a strong ecclesiastical tradition.

The Irish branch of the Hamilton family was descended from one Hugh Hamilton who settled at Lisbane, Co. Down, in the time of James I and was one of the Hamiltons of Evandale, of whom Sir James Hamilton of Finnart (d. 1540) was an ancestor. His great-great-grandson (Thomas’s grandfather) was Hugh Hamilton (1729–1805), successively a Fellow of Trinity College, Dublin, Dean of Armagh, Bishop of Clonfert, and, finally, Bishop of Ossory. In 1772 Hugh married Isabella, eldest daughter of Hans Widman Wood. Their fifth son, also named Hugh (1790–1865), was likewise educated at Trinity College, Dublin. He was ordained in 1813, and was Rector of Inishmacsaint, Co. Fermanagh. He married Elizabeth, daughter of the Right Hon. John Staples, and their second son, Thomas, was the grandfather of C.S. Lewis.

Thomas Robert Hamilton, born on 28 June 1826, took a First in Theology at Trinity College, Dublin in 1848 and was made deacon the same year. He was much afflicted with his throat and in 1850 set out with his family on a grand tour of Europe. Two years later he took another trip for his health, this time to India. He was ordained a priest in 1853. The following year, Thomas was appointed chaplain in the Royal Navy and served with the Baltic squadron of the fleet throughout the Crimean War. In 1859 he married Mary Warren (1826–1916), the daughter of Sir John Borlase Warren (1800–1863), by whom he had four children: Lilian (1860–1934), Florence Augusta (1862–1908), Hugh (1864–1900) and Augustus (1866–1945). From 1870 until 1874 Thomas was chaplain of Holy Trinity Church, Rome, after which he returned to Ireland and took up the incumbency of St Mark’s, Dundela.

‘Through the Warrens the blood went back to a Norman knight whose bones lie at Battle Abbey,’ wrote Lewis in Surprised by Joy.

(#ulink_a94aa6d2-8f7e-524d-b3b6-530c93741438) This was the very ‘William of Warenne’ of Kipling’s poem ‘The Land’ – and it seems a pleasant coincidence that the author of Puck of Pook’s Hill owned and wrote his series of tales about the land which had once belonged to an ancestor of the author of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Hamilton was an impressive and eloquent preacher, and during many of his sermons was often seen to be shedding tears in the pulpit (‘one of his weepy ones today’, the Lewises would say).

(#ulink_644fc9c9-690c-503d-ae2f-dfddad2ac2b3) His religion was, unfortunately, marred by his intense bigotry towards Catholics, whom he considered the Devil’s own children.