C. S. Lewis – A Life

by Alister McGrath

  “You see that lamp. It is round and yellow and gives light to the whole room; and hangeth moreover from the roof. Now that thing which we call the sun is like the lamp, only far greater and brighter. It giveth light to the whole Overworld and hangeth in the sky.”

  “Hangeth from what, my Lord?” asked the Witch; and then, while they were all still thinking how to answer her, she added, with another of her soft, silver laughs, “You see? When you try to think out clearly what this sun must be, you cannot tell me. You can only tell me it is like the lamp. Your sun is a dream; and there is nothing in that dream that was not copied from the lamp. The lamp is the real thing; the sun is but a tale, a children’s story.”623

  Then Jill intervenes: what about Aslan? He’s a lion! The Witch, slightly less confidently now, asks Jill to tell her about lions. What are they like? Well, they’re like a big cat! The Witch laughs. A lion is just an imagined cat, bigger and better than the real thing. “You can put nothing into your make-believe without copying it from the real world, this world of mine, which is the only world.”624

  Most readers of this section of the book will smile at this point, realising that a seemingly sophisticated philosophical argument is clearly invalidated by the context within which Lewis sets it. Yet Lewis has borrowed this from Plato—while using Anselm of Canterbury and René Descartes as intermediaries—thus allowing classical wisdom to make an essentially Christian point.

  Lewis is clearly aware that Plato has been viewed through a series of interpretative lenses—those of Plotinus, Augustine, and the Renaissance being particularly familiar to him. Readers of Lewis’s Allegory of Love, The Discarded Image, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, and Spenser’s Images of Life will be aware that Lewis frequently highlights how extensively Plato and later Neoplatonists influenced Christian literary writers of both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Lewis’s achievement is to work Platonic themes and images into children’s literature in such a natural way that few, if any, of its young readers are aware of Narnia’s implicit philosophical tutorials, or its grounding in an earlier world of thought. It is all part of Lewis’s tactic of expanding minds by exposing them to such ideas in a highly accessible and imaginative form.

  The Problem of the Past in Narnia

  Anyone reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first time is likely to be impressed by its medieval imagery—its royal courts, castles, and chivalrous knights. It bears little relation to the 1939 world from which the four children come—or to that of subsequent readers. So is Lewis encouraging his readers to retreat into the past to escape the realities of modern life?

  There are unquestionably points at which Lewis believes the past to be preferable to the present. For example, Lewis’s battle scenes tend to emphasise the importance of boldness and bravery in personal combat. Battle is about hand-to-hand and face-to-face encounters between noble and dignified foes, in which killing is a regrettable but necessary part of securing victory. This is far removed from the warfare Lewis himself experienced in the fields around Arras in late 1917 and early 1918, where an impersonal technology hurled explosive death from a distance, often destroying friend as well as foe. There was nothing brave or bold about modern artillery or machine guns. You hardly ever got to see who killed you.

  Yet Lewis is not expecting his readers to retreat to a nostalgic and imaginary re-creation of the Middle Ages; still less is he urging us to re-create its ideas and values. Rather, Lewis is giving us a way of thinking by which we can judge our own ideas, and come to realise that they are not necessarily “right” on account of being more recent. In the Narnia series, Lewis presents a way of thinking and living in which everything fits together into a single, complex, harmonious model of the universe—the “discarded image” which Lewis explores in so many of his later scholarly writings. In doing this, he invites us to reconsider our present ways of thinking in order to reflect on whether we have lost something on our journey, and might be able to recover it.

  Yet there is a problem here. Today’s readers of the Chronicles of Narnia have to make a double leap of the imagination—not simply to imagine Narnia, but to imagine the world from which its four original visitors come, shaped by the social presuppositions, hopes, and fears of Britain in the aftermath of the Second World War. How many of today’s readers of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—smiling at the lure of Turkish Delight for Edmund (while wondering what this mysterious substance might be)—realise that the rationing of sweets did not end in Britain until February 1953, four years after the book was written? The modest sumptuousness of Narnian feasts contrasts sharply with the austerity of postwar Britain, in which even basic foodstuffs were in short supply. To appreciate the full impact of the series on its original readers, we must try to enter into a bygone world, as well as an imagined one.

  At several points, this becomes a problem for today’s readers. The most obvious of these difficulties concerns the children in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, who are white, middle-class English boys and girls with somewhat stilted and “golly gosh” turns of phrase. Lewis’s characters probably sounded a little stilted and unnatural even to his readers in the early 1950s. Many readers now need a cultural dictionary to make sense of Peter’s schoolboy jargon, such as “Old chap!” “By Jove!” and “Great Scott!”

  More problematically, some of the social attitudes of middle-class England during the 1930s and 1940s—and occasionally those of Lewis’s own childhood during the 1910s—are deeply embedded within the Narnia novels. The most obvious of these concerns women. It is clearly unfair to criticise Lewis for failing to anticipate twenty-first-century Western cultural attitudes on this matter. Nevertheless, some have argued that Lewis allocates subordinate roles to his female characters throughout the Chronicles of Narnia, and wish he had broken free of the traditional gender roles of that age.

  The case of Susan is often singled out for special comment. While playing a prominent role in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she is conspicuously absent from the final volume in the series, The Last Battle. Philip Pullman, Lewis’s most outspoken recent critic, declares that Susan “was sent to hell because she was getting interested in clothes and boys.”625 Pullman’s intense hostility towards Lewis seems to subvert any serious attempt at objective evidential analysis on his part. As all readers of the Narnia series know, at no point does Lewis suggest that Susan is “sent to hell,” let alone because of an interest in “boys.”

  Yet Susan illustrates a concern that some recent commentators have expressed about the stories of Narnia—namely, that they tend to privilege male agents. Might Narnia have been different if Lewis had met a Ruth Pitter or a Joy Davidman in the 1930s?

  It is, however, important to be fair to Lewis here. Despite the social predominance of male role models in his cultural context, the gender roles in the Chronicles of Narnia tend to be evenly balanced. Indeed, if there is a lead human character in the Chronicles of Narnia, this is played by a female. Lucy is the protagonist in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. She is the first to gain access to Narnia, and is the human who becomes closest to Aslan. She plays the lead role in Prince Caspian, and speaks the final words of human dialogue at the end of The Last Battle. Lewis was ahead of British views on gender roles during the 1940s, when the Chronicles of Narnia were conceived; he lags behind now—but not by as much as his critics suggest.

  But we now must leave the imagined realm of Narnia, and return to the real world of Oxford in the early 1950s. As we noted earlier, Lewis was becoming increasingly beleaguered and isolated. But what could he do about it?

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  1954–1960

  The Move to Cambridge: Magdalene College

  It was obvious to Lewis’s friends that he did not fit readily or easily into postwar Oxford. Lewis himself was painfully aware that he was an isolated figure there in the early 1950s. He had been passed over for senior appointments on at least three occasions. Rel
ationships within the faculty were often fractious and unpleasant. Lewis’s correspondence of May 1954 speaks openly of a “crisis” within the Oxford University Faculty of English which tempted him “to hatred many times a day.”626

  A year earlier, the English faculty at Oxford had voted on extending the range of the undergraduate curriculum from 1830 to 1914, thus allowing Oxford students to study the literature of the Victorian Age. Looking back, many would feel that this represented an entirely reasonable development, particularly in the light of the literary creativity of that important age. Yet it was a development that was robustly opposed by Lewis, if somewhat less aggressively by J. R. R. Tolkien. The English faculty’s challenge to the status quo—though ultimately unsuccessful—was nevertheless unsettling for Lewis, adding still further to his sense of isolation at Oxford. The Faculty of English increasingly coalesced around the “modernisers,” leaving Lewis dangerously alone.

  Although the Narnia series—written during Lewis’s final years at Oxford, between 1949 and 1954—proved hugely successful, Lewis’s correspondence suggests that he found himself at a low artistic ebb during the years 1949–1950. While his letters point to at least a partial recovery of his creative powers towards the end of 1951, Lewis remained imaginatively becalmed for some time. Despite its considerable commercial and reputational success, Mere Christianity was not a new book, but a reworking of four series of broadcast talks from the early 1940s. Lewis’s most important work of this period was his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), which was a substantial work of literary scholarship, rather than a creative original composition. Furthermore, the writing of this mammoth work had exhausted him, draining him of both the energy and creativity that had characterised him as a younger man.

  Lewis was also overworked. The postwar surge of students at Oxford University was creating serious difficulties for Lewis, whose tutorial responsibilities were now weighty. At Magdalen College, student numbers were escalating. Undergraduate levels had remained fairly constant at around forty during the 1930s, before slumping to record lows during the war years 1939–1945. In 1940, there were sixteen undergraduates; in 1944, only ten. After the war, the numbers soared. In 1948, there were eighty-four students; in 1952, there were seventy-six.627 Lewis’s workload became unbearable, and was clearly interfering with his academic research and writing. Although the BBC offered him an open door to make radio programmes, Lewis had to decline due to the pressure of work.628

  But what else could he do? And where else could he go? There seemed no obvious way out of his dilemma.

  The New Cambridge Chair

  Unknown to Lewis, one possible answer was emerging through developments at Oxford’s great academic rival—the University of Cambridge. Lewis had already been mentioned in the press as a possible candidate for the King Edward VII Professorship of English at Cambridge, following the death of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch in May 1944. Late in 1944, rumours abounded that he had been offered this prestigious chair.629 Even leading figures from the BBC wrote to ask when he was to take up the Cambridge chair.630 Again, however, nothing came of this. In the end, the chair was filled in 1946 by Basil Willey (1897–1978), a highly regarded literary scholar and intellectual historian.

  By the early 1950s, the University of Cambridge had one of the finest English faculties in the world. Its dominant personality was F. R. Leavis (1895–1978), whose approach to literary criticism Lewis detested. Yet Leavis was not popular at Cambridge. He had made enemies—including Henry Stanley Bennett (1889–1972), fellow of Emmanuel College and University Reader in English. A master of university politics and horse trading, Bennett had no doubt about what the Cambridge English faculty needed—a second chair, to supplement the existing King Edward VII Professorship. This new chair, Bennett believed, needed to be in medieval and Renaissance English. Perhaps more important, Bennett was quite clear who its first holder should be: Oxford’s C. S. Lewis, a powerful and credible critic of Leavis’s approach. And Bennett knew enough about university politics to make this happen.

  The advertisement appeared on 31 March 1954, with a closing date for applications of 24 April.631 On 10 May, Bennett joined seven other senior academics to elect Cambridge’s first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English in a meeting chaired by the vice-chancellor, Sir Henry Willink (1894–1973), who was also master of Magdalene College. Two of these electors were from Oxford: Lewis’s former tutor at University College, F. P. Wilson, and Lewis’s close colleague and (still) friend J. R. R. Tolkien.632 Lewis, however, had not applied for the position. The committee chose to overlook this inconvenient formality. They enthusiastically and unanimously decided to offer the job to Lewis, with Helen Gardner—then fellow in English at St. Hilda’s College, Oxford—as their second choice.633

  Willink wrote personally to Lewis to offer him the position, emphasising its landmark importance. The electors, he declared, “were unanimous with a warmth and sincerity which could not have been exceeded, to invite you to become the first holder of what we feel will be a Chair of great value to the University.”634 The advantages of the position for Lewis were obvious. Moving to Cambridge would not merely extricate Lewis from a situation he was known to find difficult. It would also eliminate any responsibility on his part for undergraduate teaching, and free him to devote his time to research and writing. It would also triple Lewis’s salary.

  Lewis replied to Willink by return of post, declining the position.635 In the manner of both its speed and its substance, Lewis’s reply is somewhat puzzling. He responded with almost indecent haste to the offer, setting out reasons for refusing the position which seem less than compelling. Lewis suggested that he was not in a position to move to Cambridge, in that he would lose the services of Fred Paxford, his gardener and handyman. And he was, in any case, too old for a new chair; they needed someone younger and more energetic.

  Yet Lewis did not trouble to ask anything about the conditions of the new position—including the critically important question of whether he would be required to move house to Cambridge. Nor does it seem to have occurred to him that the Cambridge electors were aware of his age, which was not unusual for such a senior appointment.

  Willink was not impressed by Lewis’s somewhat feeble reasons for declining, and was probably somewhat hurt at the speed with which Lewis had spurned Cambridge’s advances. He wrote to Lewis again, urging him to reconsider his position.636 Again, Lewis declined. There was now nothing that Willink could do, other than offer the position to Helen Gardner.

  Tolkien, however, was made of sterner stuff. On the morning of 17 May, he confronted Lewis in the presence of Warnie over his reasons for declining the chair. The real problem, he soon discovered, was that Lewis had misunderstood the University of Cambridge’s residence requirements for professors. He had assumed that he would have had to move lock, stock, and barrel to Cambridge, leaving behind his beloved Kilns, Paxford, and Warnie.

  Tolkien had rightly discerned that there could be some flexibility here. Immediately after the meeting, Tolkien wrote two letters. First, he explained to Willink that Lewis needed to be able to keep his house in Oxford, and have college rooms in Cambridge that would be large enough to house most of his books.637 Second, he penned a confidential letter to Bennett, expressing his faith that Cambridge would get Lewis, despite the unfortunate turn of events. They just needed to be patient. On 19 May, Lewis also wrote to Willink to clarify his situation. If he could indeed be allowed to retain his house in Oxford, while living in Cambridge during weekdays, then he would reconsider the offer.

  But by then it was too late. On 18 May, Willink had written to offer the job to Helen Gardner, Cambridge’s second choice.638 Belatedly, he confirmed to Lewis that the university’s residence requirements were perfectly open to allowing Lewis to live in Oxford at weekends during full term, and to reside in Oxford outside term. But this was now an academic issue. Willink informed him that a letter to “Choice No. 2”—Lewis never knew the id
entity of this person—had already been dispatched.639 The matter was now closed.

  But it wasn’t. On 19 May, Professor Basil Willey—one of the Cambridge electors to the new chair—wrote confidentially to Willink. It now seemed “very probable” that Helen Gardner would decline the position that had just been offered to her.640 Willey gave no indication of where this information came from, nor did he explain why Gardner was so likely to refuse Cambridge’s offer.641 But he was right.

  After allowing the customary decent interval to pass to show that she was taking the offer seriously—something that Lewis had so conspicuously failed to do—Helen Gardner politely declined the chair on 3 June. She did not explain the reason for her decision. However, after Lewis’s death, Gardner revealed that she had picked up rumours at that time that Lewis now wanted the chair, and that she herself had believed he was its ideal occupant.642 Her refusal of the position reflected her knowledge of who would occupy the chair as a result. Relieved as much as delighted by Gardner’s diplomatic masterstroke, Willink wrote again to Lewis: “No. 2 has declined, and I am filled with hope that after all Cambridge will obtain the acceptance of No. 1.” He also mentioned that his own college, Magdalene, might be able to offer Lewis the rooms that he needed.643

  It was enough. The deal was done. Lewis agreed to be appointed to the new chair effective 1 October 1954, but would not take up the position until 1 January 1955, allowing him time to settle his affairs in Oxford.644 Lewis’s departure from Magdalen created a vacancy in the fellowship, which had to be filled. His allies within the college quickly decided whom they wished to succeed him. Who better to follow Lewis than Owen Barfield?645 This proposal, however, was defeated, and Lewis was eventually succeeded by Emrys L. Jones.