C. S. Lewis – A Life
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Yet Lewis’s popular fame did cause a certain degree of irritation for some academics. One line in the Time article particularly riled some professional theologians, who baulked at the suggestion that “a man who could talk theology without pulling a long face or being dull was just what a lot of people in war-beleaguered Britain wanted.” The wise kept their counsel, hoping that people would soon forget about Lewis; the foolish let rip with theological broadsides, thereby raising both Lewis’s profile and his appeal.
One such broadside came from the pen of an obscure American Episcopalian theologian, Norman Pittenger (1905–1997). Irritated that Time had incomprehensibly overlooked his own vastly superior claims to be the nation’s top Christian apologist, Pittenger declared that Lewis was a theologically lightweight heretic—a total liability for the kind of intelligent Christianity that he himself so conspicuously represented. America took no notice of such self-promotion, and went back to reading Lewis.
Lewis, then, was famous by the time the Second World War ended in the summer of 1945. If the simple philosophy of life propounded by modern celebrity culture has any validity, Lewis at that point should have been a happy and fulfilled person. Yet Lewis’s personal history for the next nine years tells a quite different story. Fame may have raised Lewis’s profile, but in the first place, this just made him a more obvious target for those who disliked his religious beliefs. And in the second, many of his academic colleagues came to believe that he had sold out to popular culture to secure that fame. He had sold his academic birthright for a populist pottage. Though he does not appear to have realised this shift, Lewis was about to enter into a period of rejection, misfortune, and personal struggle.
The Darker Side of Fame
The Second World War finally ended in Europe on 8 May 1945. Tolkien felt that things had been looking up for a while. “The Bird”—as he referred to the Eagle and Child—was now “gloriously empty,” the beer “improved,” and the landlord “wreathed in welcoming smiles.” Their Tuesday meetings were once more a “feast of reason and flow of soul.”528 The first meeting of the Inklings after the ending of the war in Europe was scheduled for Tuesday, 15 May at the Eagle and Child.
Charles Williams would not be attending. He had been taken ill the previous week, and was recuperating in the Radcliffe Infirmary, only a few moments’ walk north of the Eagle and Child. Lewis decided to visit Williams on the way to the first postwar Inklings gathering, so that he could convey his friend’s best wishes to the group. Nothing could have prepared him for what happened next. To his shock, he was told that Williams had just died.
Although all the Inklings were stunned by this unexpected news, Lewis was by far the most affected. Williams had become his literary and spiritual lodestar throughout the period of the war, displacing Tolkien in his affections. A small volume of essays that the Inklings had planned as a tribute to Williams now became his memorial instead. It was a crushing personal blow for Lewis.
Others, however, soon put this sad event behind them. Tolkien’s bibulous delight that the war had ended was soon enhanced further by the news that he had been elected to one of Oxford’s two Merton Professorships of English in 1945. He had long dreamed to establish himself in one of these chairs, and Lewis in the other. One goal had now been achieved; the second soon seemed within their reach. There was no doubt in Tolkien’s mind that Lewis needed a professorship, for the sake of his sanity.
Why so? Once the war was ended, student numbers at Oxford University began to rise. Although this was good news for the university as a whole, bringing much-needed financial revitalization to an institution that had been under-resourced during the war years, it placed the college tutorial systems under considerable strain. Lewis’s personal workload increased substantially, leaving him less and less time for reading and writing. If Lewis became an Oxford professor, he would not have to give tutorials to undergraduates. Although he would be required to give lectures at undergraduate level for the faculty and undertake graduate supervision, these demands were modest in comparison with the crippling postwar tutorial workload that Lewis was beginning to experience. A promotion would be good news for Lewis.
Then the window of opportunity opened. In 1947, David Nichol Smith retired from the second Merton Chair of English. Lewis had expectations of filling the position, and Tolkien was clear that it ought to be his. As one of the electors to the chair, Tolkien was well placed to support Lewis’s election. But Tolkien seems to have been unaware of the hostility that had been building up towards Lewis at Oxford. As he pressed Lewis’s case, Tolkien was taken aback by the “extraordinary animosity”529 directed against Lewis within the Faculty of English. His recent populist writings and negative attitude towards higher degrees were seen as potential liabilities for the faculty. Tolkien totally failed to persuade his fellow electors Helen Darbishire, H. W. Garrod, and C. H. Wilkinson to take Lewis seriously as a candidate. In the end, the second Merton Chair went to F. P. Wilson, a solid if slightly dull Shakespearean scholar, whose virtues included not being C. S. Lewis.
But more bad news was to come. In 1948, Oxford’s Goldsmith’s Chair of English Literature, linked to a fellowship at New College, fell vacant. In the end, it was offered to the noted literary biographer Lord David Cecil. Lewis was passed over.
The next rejection took place in 1951, as Oxford University prepared to elect a new Professor of Poetry. The ballot paper had only two names. They were confusingly similar, and voting errors were a real possibility. Lewis’s single opponent was Cecil Day Lewis (1904–1972), later to become the British poet laureate. (A third candidate dropped out, to allow the anti–C. S. Lewis faction a clear run.) In the end, C. D. Lewis won the ballot by 194 votes to 173. Once more, Lewis faced rejection.
There were, however, consolations in the midst of this bleakness. On 17 March 1948, the Council of the Royal Society of Literature unanimously voted to elect Lewis as a fellow of the Society.530 Yet Lewis had no doubt that he was regarded by many of his academic colleagues with suspicion or derision. He seemed to be a prophet without honour in his own city and university.
This prickly hostility towards Lewis, occasionally degenerating to an irrational hatred, was also evident within his own college. A. N. Wilson, in researching his 1990 biography of Lewis, recalled discussing him with an old man who had been a fellow of Magdalen around this time. Lewis, the former don declared, was “the most evil man he had ever met.” Wilson naturally wanted to know the basis of this bizarre geriatric judgement. Lewis’s degeneracy, it turned out, was that he believed in God, and used his “cleverness to corrupt the young.” As Wilson rightly remarked, precisely that same charge had once been levelled against Socrates.531
While this ludicrous attitude is easily dismissed, even though it is still often repeated, the academic hostility towards Lewis within Oxford at this time was not totally irrational or vindictive. The winds of change were blowing, and Lewis was coming to be seen as a potential problem rather than a resource for the future of the Oxford Faculty of English. Graduate students were beginning to flock to Oxford, often to study for a BLitt (Bachelor of Letters) in English literature, bringing much-needed income to both individual colleges and the university. These students needed supervision—a task for which Lewis had no enthusiasm. He was regularly heard to remark that Oxford knew three kinds of literacy: the literate, the illiterate, and the B.Litterate—and that his personal sympathies lay entirely with the first two. As the Oxford Faculty of English began to reestablish its teaching and research programmes after the war, Lewis’s negative attitude towards higher degrees and research was increasingly seen as unhelpful, and out of touch with the changing educational situation.
Dementia and Alcoholism: Lewis’s “Mother” and Brother
Lewis’s problems were not limited to his professional work; they extended to his personal life. Although the gloom of wartime economies and shortages gradually lifted, life was not easy for Lewis at The Kilns. His letters of the late 1940s show a con
cern about Mrs. Moore’s health, and broad hints that things were becoming difficult within the household. Maureen had long since left home, leaving Lewis to deal with a fraught situation. Maids now had to be employed to keep the household running smoothly, and their relationships with Mrs. Moore (and each other) were often fractious. Lewis found it hard to cope. When the University of St. Andrews in Scotland awarded Lewis an honorary degree in July 1946, he gloomily remarked that he would much have preferred to receive a “case of Scotch whiskey.”532
That suggestion would have delighted Lewis’s brother, Warnie. At this time, Warnie was fighting what we now know to have been a losing battle with alcohol addiction. While on holiday in Ireland in the summer of 1947, Warnie engaged in binge drinking of such ferocity that he was taken unconscious to a hospital in Drogheda before he finally dried out and was allowed to go home. Sadly, this pattern was now to be repeated, its unpredictability making it all the more difficult to cope with.
The Kilns had become a dysfunctional household. Lewis’s domestic life revolved around an increasingly irritable and confused Mrs. Moore, now showing the classic symptoms of dementia, and his increasingly irritated and alcoholic brother. It was hardly a happy environment, made worse by postwar austerity measures, including the continued rationing of many everyday items. In 1947, Lewis wrote to a colleague to apologise for having difficulty attending meetings: his time was “almost fully” and “unpredictably” taken up with his “duties as a nurse and a domestic servant.”533 His challenges, he remarked, were both material and psychological. Life at The Kilns was becoming unbearable, with Lewis acting as caregiver regularly for his “mother” and occasionally for his brother. It was all too much.
Maureen had noticed the pressure that the Lewis brothers were under in caring for her aging mother and her decrepit dog, Bruce, and did what she could to relieve them. She and her husband moved into The Kilns and allowed Lewis and Warnie to live in their house in Malvern for two weeks. It was, however, only a temporary respite. In April 1949, Lewis apologised to Owen Barfield for his tardiness in replying to letters; he was trying to cope with “Dog’s stools and human vomits.”534
On 13 June 1949, Lewis was hospitalised with symptoms of exhaustion, later diagnosed as a streptococcus infection requiring injections of penicillin every three hours. He was finally allowed to go home on 23 June. Warnie was outraged that his brother was so exhausted by the needs of Mrs. Moore, and demanded that she allow Lewis time to recover. Gratefully, Lewis planned to spend a month in Ireland to rest and recharge his batteries in the company of Arthur Greeves. Yet before he could go, Warnie succumbed to another extended bout of alcohol overdose. (Anxious to protect his brother’s dignity, Lewis described his brother’s problem as “nervous insomnia,” only revealing its true nature—“Drink”—to his confidant Arthur Greeves.)535 In the end, Lewis was left with no option but to cancel his proposed trip to Ireland, and look after Mrs. Moore on his own.
There were unquestionably moments of joy in this dark period in Lewis’s life. Yet even his joy at reading the finally completed text of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings in October was tempered by his knowledge that the two men now rarely met. Few can miss the pathos in Lewis’s letters to his old friend: “I miss you very much.”536 Though the two men lived and worked in the same city and university, they were no longer close. Lewis found at least some degree of intellectual consolation elsewhere, as is evident from the flurry of correspondence with the novelist Dorothy L. Sayers around this time. Yet the tectonic plates of Lewis’s life were shifting. Old friendships were withering, and with them the intellectual stimulation and support they had once brought.
Throughout this troubled period, Mrs. Moore was becoming increasingly confused and disturbed, and eventually declined to the point that she had to be admitted to a nursing home. After she had fallen out of bed three times on 29 April 1950, the decision was made to admit her to Restholme, a specialist nursing home at 230 Woodstock Road, Oxford. Lewis, who visited her every day, was plunged into a new anxiety. The nursing fees were £500 per year. How could he afford this? What would happen when he retired and no longer had a college income on which to rely?
In the end, the issue was settled by an influenza pandemic which broke out in the northern English port city of Liverpool late in December 1950. It spread rapidly, and reached its peak in mid-January 1951. Official figures indicate that the death rate was about 40 percent greater than that of the 1918–1919 flu pandemic, which had caused Britain such misery during its recovery from the Great War. At its height, on 12 January 1951, the pandemic claimed the life of Mrs. Moore at the age of seventy-nine. She was laid to rest at Holy Trinity churchyard on 15 January, in the same grave as her old friend Alice Hamilton Moore, who had been buried there on 6 November 1939. (The parish burial records indicate that Alice Moore had lived at The Kilns before her death, suggesting that she had been part of the household around that time.) Warnie was unable to attend her funeral, being himself a victim of the same flu that had carried her off.
Hostility towards Lewis at Oxford
Meanwhile, Lewis’s personal difficulties were compounded by persistent institutional hostility and rejection within Oxford University. A small part—but only a small part—of this hostility represented the predictable prejudice of those few who believed Christianity was a sign of mental illness or moral depravity. The real roots of the problem were Lewis’s popular acclaim and his seeming disregard for the norms of traditional academic scholarship. His popular works, it was suggested, distracted him from academic research and writing, placing him on the margins of academic culture, rather than at its centre. Lewis, it was pointed out by his critics, had not published anything of academic seriousness and weight since A Preface to “Paradise Lost” in 1942. Lewis would need to remedy this deficit as a matter of urgency if he was to regain his academic credibility.
Lewis was painfully aware of such criticisms, which were not without merit. Indeed, it is difficult not to read Lewis’s correspondence of the postwar period without sensing unease, uncertainty, and unhappiness over his situation. Lewis had signed a contract in 1935 with Oxford University Press for a volume on sixteenth-century English literature, and was feeling under some pressure to complete it. Yet his home situation was so chaotic that he simply could not find the time to read the vast number of primary sources needed to produce this book. By the middle of 1949, he was exhausted and physically incapable of the intense concentration that the reading and writing for this landmark book would take. Popular books were less demanding, and flowed easily from Lewis’s pen. But this one was different.
Nothing could be done while Mrs. Moore remained alive and required Lewis’s constant ministrations. After her death in January 1951, Lewis was able to secure a year’s sabbatical leave from his teaching responsibilities at Magdalen College to allow him to work flat out on this project during the academic year 1951–1952. By September 1951, Lewis felt able to inform his Italian correspondent Don Giovanni Calabria (1873–1954) of his change in health. Iam valeo—“I am now better.”537 His spirits would have further been lifted by a letter from the British prime minister, Winston Churchill, offering to recommend him for a C. B. E. (Commander of the Order of the British Empire, one level below a knighthood) in the 1952 King’s New Year’s Honours List. Lewis declined;538 it was, however, clearly a boost for his morale.
He began work with a vengeance on his new project on English literature. Helen Gardner recalled regularly seeing Lewis hard at work in Duke Humfrey’s Library, working his way resolutely through the Bodleian Library’s holdings of the writers of this bygone age. Never one to trust secondary sources, Lewis devoured the originals, spitting out what was useless and digesting what was valuable.
If Lewis’s academic reputation had been flagging, it was more than amply restored with the publication of this seven-hundred-page work in September 1954. His election as a fellow of the British Academy the following year was directly related to this massive piece of sch
olarship. But it was too late to change the way he was seen at Oxford. Perceptions had crystallised. Lewis was seen as a spent force by many in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Other problems pressed in on him. The regular Thursday evening meetings of the Inklings continued after the war, often enlivened by the arrival of food parcels from Lewis’s American admirers. Lewis insisted on sharing this bounty with his friends, all of whom were suffering from food shortages caused by the postwar austerity measures. Yet all was not well with the Inklings. Tensions rose between members. Tempers flared. Enthusiasm waned. Numbers fell. Finally, on 27 October 1949, Warnie’s diary recorded the end of those meetings: “Nobody came.” Although members of the group would continue to socialise at the Eagle and Child on Tuesdays, the Inklings had come to an end as a serious literary discussion group.
Things were unquestionably complicated by the growing estrangement between Tolkien and Lewis, which Tolkien put down in no small part to the influence of Charles Williams during the period of the war. Tolkien felt—not without reason—that he had been displaced by Williams in Lewis’s affections. It was, in Tolkien’s view, a lamentable development, which he deeply regretted. But it had happened. And it would get worse. Tolkien was irritated by what seemed to him to be Lewis’s unacknowledged borrowing of Tolkien’s mythological ideas at points in his science fiction trilogy. In 1948, Tolkien wrote Lewis a long letter, clearly in response to a significant falling out between them over a literary issue.539 Yet despite the cooling in their friendship, Tolkien continued to do all he could to help Lewis secure academic preferment at Oxford. For Tolkien, this was a simple matter of justice.