C. S. Lewis: A Biography

He spent four weeks with his father towards the end of the Long Vacation. ‘Jacks sets me a very good example of industry,’ wrote Albert Lewis to Warnie on 26 September 1927. ‘I leave him at breakfast when I go out and immediately he has finished it he goes up to the end room and works steadily till lunch. In the afternoon he goes out for a walk. I am glad to say that he is in good health and great spirits and has many funny “wheezes” about the older Dons at Oxford.’

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Not all Lewis’s ‘work’, however, was of a very academic nature, as he seems to have spent much of the month at Little Lea compiling an Encyclopaedia Boxoniana of all his and Warnie’s early stories.

(#ulink_81f45f00-3924-58cc-9faf-6d74c4c88870) At about this time he also began his only attempt at a modern novel, which did not get much beyond the first 7,000 words. The fragment that remains among the Lewis Papers

(#ulink_cf250412-b643-589d-9efd-4ec6fc38a96d) takes the narrator, Dr Easley, from Liverpool to Belfast on a first visit to his Irish relations, and includes a good deal of amusing dialogue with a loquacious Irishman whom he meets on the voyage – typical of the voyages that Lewis had made and was still to make so many times.

At Oxford there was little time for writing during term. Most of each day was taken up with tutorials and lectures, with a walk in the afternoon if not captured for chores by Mrs Moore. The evenings were mostly filled also, as he explained to Warnie on 12 December 1927 when excusing the brevity of letters written to him in term time:

My evenings for the fortnight in term run thus: Mon. Play reading with undergraduates (till Midnight). Tue. Mermaid club. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon with undergraduates. Thurs. – Frid. – Sat. – Sunday. Common room till late. Mon. Play reading. Tue. Icelandic Society. Wedn. Anglo-Saxon. Thurs. Philosophical supper. Fri. – Sat. – Sunday. As you will see this gives at the very best only three free evenings in the even weeks and two in the odd. And into these two everything in the way of casual entertaining, correspondence, and what we used to call ‘A-h-h-h!’ has to be crammed.

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That Christmas he spent with his father in Belfast. As Albert Lewis aged, he became more and more difficult and demanding, but Lewis himself was learning ever greater patience and charity – though still occasionally letting off steam to Warnie in letters packed with examples of their father’s exigent behaviour. This Christmas, besides walks with Arthur Greeves, he managed to get out for one evening to give him and John Bryson dinner at a Belfast hotel: ‘to be seated in a hotel, eating an ordinary dinner and drinking your wine, indulging in ordinary chat, and then to reflect that Belfast is outside the window, is a marvellous sensation. I discovered to my surprise that Bryson (whom I always regarded as an imposing junior Don) was in just the same state at home as Arthur and myself,’ he wrote to Warnie in the current diary-letter.

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Albert Lewis finally retired on a pension from the Petty Sessions in May 1928, his health growing more precarious. The poor man suffered acutely from lumbago and the occasional bout of sciatica. This made visits home even more of a penance, since his father was in the house all the time; but Lewis managed to stay for part of each vacation, and continued with long and cheerful letters.

Early in 1928 he was working on the idea of a book about sixteenth-century letters, sparked off by reading the letters of Erasmus, a task necessitating long, quiet days in the Bodleian which he described in glowing terms to his father. But very soon he found himself immersed in and fascinated by medieval French poetry, of which he would transcribe and translate scraps in letters to Warnie, apologizing that ‘my reading contains less and less that I can share with my non-professional friends’, but delighting in his new discovery of the world of courtly love and allegory. ‘Don’t you think this is rather jolly?’ he wrote to Warnie in that same letter of 24 April 1928. ‘In one of those gardens in a dream, which medieval love poetry is full of, we find the tomb of a knight, dead for love, covered with flowers.’ Then, after quoting the Old French, he goes on, ‘I suppose it can be very roughly Englished:

And birds that for the soul of that Signor

Who lay beneath, songs of true love did pour:

Being hungered, each from off the flowers bore

A kiss, and felt that day no hunger more.

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‘The odd thing is that one would expect the same rhyme going through to be monotonous and ugly: but to my ear it produces a beautiful lulling like the sound of the sea.’

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This letter is the first indication that Lewis’s mind was turning seriously in the direction of his most famous volume of literary scholarship, The Allegory of Love, and by July of the same year he was writing the first draft. ‘I have actually begun the first chapter of my book,’ he told his father on July 10. ‘The actual book is going to be about medieval love poetry and the medieval idea of love, which is a very paradoxical business indeed when you go into it.’

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Little else happened in 1928 of which Lewis took much note. Besides the usual visits to Belfast, Arthur Greeves stayed with him at Magdalen in the early autumn. After a great deal of ‘College politics’, inner rings and cliques functioning in full force, George Gordon was elected President of Magdalen in November, to the general satisfaction of Lewis himself, and indeed the majority of the Fellows.

Lewis spent Christmas 1928 with his father – Albert’s last, though his son had no idea that such a thing was likely – and was able to present him with his two earliest reviews, both in The Oxford Magazine, of Evelyn Waugh’s Rossetti (23 October) and Hugh Kingsmill’s Matthew Arnold (15 November) – the first laudatory and the second condemnatory in the extreme, one of the earliest examples of his witheringly logical approach, the delenda est Carthago in which he became so adept in later years. (Yet he developed no animus against the author since, as Chad Walsh records, he was quoting Kingsmill’s brilliant parody of A.E. Housman with much glee and commendation a dozen years later.)

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A flu-ish cold, with temperature and sore throat, confined Lewis to bed and prevented him from visiting his father in April 1929, his only holiday from Oxford being a four-day walking tour with Barfield and several other friends from Salisbury to Lyme Regis.

As Lewis was having to devote July 1929, as usual, to the correction of examination papers, he wrote to his father on 18 June about a holiday together: ‘I am still undecided (it depends largely on when I finish Chapter II of the book) whether August 12th or something like August 25th would be best for me,’

(#ulink_c16503fe-a97b-5126-8674-1d5cf8733355) at the same time urging his father to take a holiday with him away from Little Lea. He crossed to Ireland on the earlier date and was writing to Warnie on the 25th: ‘This is a line to let you know that P. [Papy] is rather seriously ill.’

(#ulink_b98d1249-ae9a-5b67-91c0-922567e45e9e) Albert Lewis’s health deteriorated rapidly, with Jack in day and night attendance – and writing bulletins to Warnie in Shanghai, who could not possibly receive them for a month or six weeks.

On 3 September an operation was deemed necessary. This was performed a few days later, and seemed successful. ‘The operation, in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer,’ wrote Jack to Warnie on 29 September.

They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home for ten days … By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th, and my work for next term was getting really desperate and, as [the doctor] said I might easily wait for several weeks more and still be in the same position … I crossed to Oxford on Saturday, Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon.

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Jack was confused about the dates when he wrote this. He left Oxford on Tuesday, 24 September. However, when he arrived in Belfast on the evening of Wednesday 25 September, he found that his father had died that afternoon.

Both Warnie and Jack felt Albert Lewis’s death far more than they had thought possible; and the wrench of leaving Little Lea, their home for most of their lives, whatever their later reactions to it, was also acute. The letters for the next six months are taken up mainly with the business of sorting and selling or keeping the contents of the house, employing a caretaker while the house was put up for sale, and generally winding up the Lewis affairs in Belfast.

In November the letters show Lewis living a normal Oxford life again – sitting up late talking of Norse mythology with Tolkien; learning textual criticism so as to be able to teach it the following term to B.Litt. students; reading Anglo-Saxon poetry with a congenial and promising pupil, Neil Ker.

(#ulink_f78d2ed1-442d-55ff-9301-df3588397f0c) ‘Ker shares to the full’, Lewis wrote to Arthur on 5 November, ‘my enthusiasm for the saga world and we had a pleasant evening – with the wind still roaring outside.’

(#ulink_9528912e-bc06-538e-b732-ad1c4a5cc3e5) He also attended meetings of the Icelandic Society, the Linguistic Society, the Michaelmas Club, and so on.

As soon as term ended he was off to Ireland, staying with Arthur and setting to work at Little Lea each day. On his return journey to Oxford on 21 December he was reading Bunyan’s Grace Abounding: ‘I should like to know … in general,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 22 December, ‘what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil-worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what?’

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He was present at the Christmas Eve celebrations in Magdalen for the first time that year, and found them most impressive. He still did not attend church, even on Christmas Day, but was finding more and more of a religious experience during his long walks in the country – ‘the utter homeliness, the Englishness, the Christendom of it’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 December. It was, he said, so different from a walk they had taken in Co. Antrim a week or so earlier, and yet that too was but ‘another instance of … the “broad-mindedness” of the infinite … Perhaps it is less strange that the Absolute should make both than that we should be able to love both.’

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Looking back in 1935 to his long friendship with Greeves, Lewis summed up their relationship and what he owed to the friend who always remained steadfast to the Christian faith however much he bombarded him with the ‘thin artillery’ of the rationalist:

He remains victor in that debate. It is I who have come round. The thing is symbolical of much in our joint history. He was not a clever boy, he was even a dull boy; I was a scholar. He had no ‘ideas’. I bubbled over with them. It might seem that I had much to give him and that he had nothing to give me. But this is not the truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments, but he had feelings to offer, feelings which most mysteriously – for he was always very inarticulate – he taught me to share. Hence, in our commerce, I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him but failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return.

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Meanwhile plans for the future were going ahead. Warnie was to join the Lewis – Moore set-up, but a bigger house must be found, and now there might be sufficient money to purchase a definite home of their own, if Little Lea sold well enough.

Warnie’s service abroad ended in March. He reached England on 16 April 1930 and went straight to London where his brother met him, taking him back to Oxford and then down to Bournemouth where the family holiday was in progress. Later in the month they went over to Belfast to continue sorting out the accumulation of years at Little Lea, selecting what books and furniture to keep, and arranging for the sale of the rest. They had already decided what to do with all the toys that had been the foundation and background to the world of Boxen and its literature, and Jack had written to Warnie on 12 January 1930:

I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all, these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’, and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all) we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol … and the character rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us.

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Like the children at the end of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, ‘we took turn about in digging a hole in the vegetable garden in which to put our toys’, recorded Warnie in his diary on 23 April 1930, ‘and then carried the old attic trunk down and buried them. What struck me most was the scantiness of the material out of which that remarkable imaginary world was constructed. By tacit mutual consent the boxes of characters were buried unopened.’

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Warnie was posted to Bulford on Salisbury Plain in mid-May, but was able to get leave early in June to superintend the final sale of Little Lea, which he left for the last time on 3 June. But little more than a fortnight later their combined house-hunting on the outskirts of Oxford led them to The Kilns, Headington Quarry, which was to be their home for the rest of their lives – and which would become by the end, thirty-three years later, much dearer to Jack who was to know there his greatest happiness and his greatest sorrow near the end of his life.