A Grief Observed engages emotions with a passion and intensity unlike anything else in Lewis’s body of works, past or future. Lewis’s earlier discussion of suffering in The Problem of Pain (1940) tends to treat it as something that can be approached objectively and dispassionately. The existence of pain is presented as an intellectual puzzle which Christian theology is able to frame satisfactorily, if not entirely resolve. Lewis was quite clear about his intentions in writing this earlier work: “The only purpose of the book is to solve the intellectual problem raised by suffering.”708 Lewis may have faced all the intellectual questions raised by suffering and death before. Yet nothing seems to have prepared him for the emotional firestorm that Davidman’s death precipitated.
Suffering can only be little more than a logical riddle for those who encounter it from a safe distance. When it is experienced directly and immediately, firsthand—as when Lewis lost his mother, and again at the devastating death of Davidman—it is like an emotional battering ram, crashing into the gates of the castle of faith. To its critics, The Problem of Pain amounts to an evasion of the reality of evil and suffering as experienced realities; instead, they are reduced to abstract ideas, which demand to be fitted into the jigsaw puzzle of faith. To read A Grief Observed is to realise how a rational faith can fall to pieces when it is confronted with suffering as a personal reality, rather than as a mild theoretical disturbance.
Lewis seems to have realised that his earlier approach had engaged with the surface of human life, not its depths:
Where is God? . . . Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.709
In June 1951, Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope to ask for her prayers. Everything was too easy for him. “I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across ‘a plain called Ease.’” Might a change in his circumstances, he wondered, lead him to a deeper appreciation of his faith? Might a religious idea that he now understood only partly, if at all, suddenly take on new significance, becoming a new reality? “I now feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything: any morning a doctrine I thought I already possessed may blossom into this new reality.”710 It is difficult to read this without reflecting on how the somewhat superficial engagement with suffering in The Problem of Pain would “blossom” into the more mature, engaged, and above all wise account found in A Grief Observed.
Lewis’s powerful, frank, and honest account of his own experience in A Grief Observed is to be valued as an authentic and moving account of the impact of bereavement. It is little wonder that the work has secured such a wide readership, given its accurate description of the emotional turmoil that results from a loved one’s death. Indeed, some even recommended it to Lewis as an excellent account of the process of grieving, quite unaware of its true origins. Yet the work is significant at another level, in exposing the vulnerability and fragility of a purely rational faith. While Lewis undoubtedly recovered his faith after his wife’s death, A Grief Observed suggests that this faith was some distance removed from the cool, logical approach to faith that he once set out in The Problem of Pain.
Some have mistakenly concluded that A Grief Observed is a tacit acknowledgement of the explanatory failure of Christianity, and that Lewis emerged from this process of grieving as an agnostic. This is a hasty and superficial conclusion, and shows a lack of familiarity with the text itself, or with Lewis’s subsequent writings. It must be remembered that A Grief Observed describes what Lewis regards as a process of testing—not a testing of God, but a testing of Lewis. “God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t.”711
Those wishing to present Lewis as having become an agnostic at this time must selectively freeze that narrative, presenting one of its frames or phases as its final outcome. Lewis makes it clear that, in his distress, he sets out to explore every intellectual option open to him. No stone was to remain unturned, no path unexplored. Maybe there is no God. Maybe there is a God, but he turns out to be a sadistic tyrant. Maybe faith is just a dream. Like the psalmist, Lewis plumbs the depths of despair, relentlessly and thoroughly, determined to wrest the hidden meaning from their darkness. Finally, Lewis begins to recover a sense of spiritual balance, recalibrating his theology in light of the shattering events of the previous weeks.
A letter Lewis wrote a few weeks before his death both captures the argumentative flow of A Grief Observed and accurately summarises its outcome. Lewis had maintained a correspondence since the early 1950s with Sister Madeleva Wolff (1887–1964), a distinguished medieval literary scholar and poet who had recently retired as president of Saint Mary’s College at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Lewis speaks of expressing his grief “from day to day in all its rawness and sinful reactions and follies.” He warns her that, though A Grief Observed “ends with faith,” it nevertheless “raises all the blackest doubts en route.”712
It is all too easy—especially for those predisposed towards depicting Lewis as having become an agnostic, or who lack the time to read him properly—to fix on these “sinful reactions and follies” as if they represent the final outcome of Lewis’s no-holds-barred exploration of the entire gamut of theistic possibilities in response to his crisis of grief. Yet Lewis’s judgement on his own writing is precisely the conclusion that will be reached by anyone who reads the work in its entirety.
It is difficult, and possibly quite improper, to seize on a single moment, a solitary statement, that represents a turning point in Lewis’s grief-stricken meditations. Yet there seems to be a clear tipping point in Lewis’s thinking, which centres around his desire to be able to suffer instead of his wife: “If only I could bear it, or the worst of it, of any of it, instead of her.”713 Lewis’s line of thought is that this is the mark of the true lover—a willingness to take on pain and suffering, in order that the beloved might be spared its worst.
Lewis then makes the obvious, and critical, Christological connection: that this is what Jesus did at the Cross. Is it allowed, he “babbles,” to take on suffering on behalf of someone else, so that they are spared at least something of its pain and sense of dereliction? The answer lies in the crucified Christ:
It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be so done. He replies to our babble, “You cannot and you dare not. I could and dared.”714
There are two interconnected, yet distinct, points being made here. First, Lewis is coming to a realisation that, great though his love for his wife may have been, it had its limits. Self-love will remain present in his soul, tempering his love for anyone else and limiting the extent to which he is prepared to suffer for that person. Second, Lewis is moving towards, not so much a recognition of the self-emptying of God (that theological idea is readily found elsewhere in his writings), but a realisation of its existential significance for the problem of human suffering. God could bear suffering. And God did bear suffering. And that, in turn, allows us to bear the ambiguity and risks of faith, knowing that its outcome is secured. A Grief Observed is a narrative of the testing and maturing of faith, not simply its recovery—and certainly not its loss.
So why did Lewis react so severely to Davidman’s death? There are clearly a number of factors involved. However questionably the relationship had been initiated, Davidman had become Lewis’s lover and intellectual soul mate, who helped him retain his passion and motivation for writing. She played—or, more accurately, was allowed to play—a role unique among Lewis’s female circle. Her loss was deeply felt.
In the end the storm was stilled, and the waves ceased to crash against Lewis’s house of faith. The assault had been extreme, and the testing severe. Yet its outcome was a faith which, like gold, had passed through the refiner’s fire.
Lewis’s Failing Health, 1961–1962
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Lewis’s faith might have survived, perhaps even becoming more robust. But the same could not be said of his health. In June 1961, Lewis spent two days in Oxford with his childhood friend Arthur Greeves. It was, he later declared, “one of the happiest times.” Yet Lewis’s letter to Greeves thanking him for visiting him had a darker aspect. Lewis disclosed he would soon have to enter the hospital for an operation to deal with an enlarged prostate gland.715 It is unlikely that Greeves would have been totally surprised by this news. Lewis, he had noted during his visit, “was looking very ill.” Something was clearly wrong with him.
The operation was scheduled to take place on 2 July in the Acland Nursing Home, a private medical facility outside the National Health Service, close to the centre of Oxford. Yet it soon became clear to Lewis’s medical team that any operation was out of the question. His kidneys and heart were both failing him. His condition was inoperable. It could only be managed; it could not be cured. By the end of the summer, Lewis was so ill that he was unable to return to Cambridge to teach in the Michaelmas Term of 1961.
Realising that he might not live much longer, Lewis drew up his will. This document, dated 2 November 1961, appointed Owen Barfield and Cecil Harwood as his executors and trustees.716 Lewis bequeathed his books and manuscripts to his brother, along with any income arising from Lewis’s publications during the period of his lifetime. After Warnie’s death, Lewis’s residuary estate was to pass to his two stepsons. The will made no provision for a literary executor. Warnie would receive income from Lewis’s publications, but would have no legal rights over them.
Lewis also stipulated that four further individuals were to receive £100, if there were sufficient funds in Lewis’s bank account at the time of his death: Maureen Blake and his three godchildren, Laurence Harwood, Lucy Barfield, and Sarah Neylan.717 Shortly afterwards, Lewis seems to have realised that he had failed to give any recognition to those who had cared for him at The Kilns. In a codicil of 10 December 1961, Lewis added two further names to this list: his gardener and handyman Fred Paxford, who was to receive £100, and his housekeeper Molly Miller, who was to receive £50.
14.1 The Acland Nursing Home, 25 Banbury Road, Oxford, in 1900. The nursing home, founded in 1882, was named after Sarah Acland, wife of Sir Henry Acland, formerly Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford University. It moved to its Banbury Road site in 1897.
These seem paltry sums, given that, after probate on 1 April 1964, Lewis’s estate was valued at £55,869, with a death duty payable of £12,828. Yet Lewis had little idea of his personal worth, and was now constantly worried about large demands from the Inland Revenue, which might bring him close to bankruptcy. His will also reveals anxiety over what might happen if the death duty were to exceed his realisable assets.
Lewis had hoped to be able to return to his normal teaching responsibilities at Magdalene College the next term, in January 1962. Yet as the months passed, Lewis realised that he was simply not well enough to allow this to happen. He wrote to a student he was meant to be supervising to apologise for his enforced absence in the spring of 1962, and to explain the problem:
They can’t operate on my prostate till they’ve got my heart and kidneys right, and it begins to look as if they can’t get my heart & kidneys right till they operate on my prostate. So we’re in what an examinee, by a happy slip of the pen, called “a viscous circle.”718
Lewis was finally able to go back to Cambridge on 24 April 1962 and resume his teaching, giving biweekly lectures on Spenser’s Faerie Queene.719 Yet he had not been healed; his condition had merely been stabilised through a careful diet and exercise regimen. Apologizing to Tolkien for being unable to attend a celebratory dinner at Merton College the following month to mark the publication of a collection of essays dedicated to him, Lewis explained that he now had to “wear a catheter, live on a low protein diet, and go early to bed.”720
The catheter in question was an amateurish contraption involving corks and pieces of rubber tubing, which was notoriously prone to leaks. It had been devised by Lewis’s friend Dr. Robert Havard, whose failure to diagnose Davidman’s cancer early enough to allow intervention ought to have raised some questions in Lewis’s mind about his professional competence. Lewis grumbled about Havard’s shortcomings in a letter of 1960, noting that he “could and should have diagnosed Joy’s trouble when she went to him about the symptoms years ago before we were married.”721 Yet despite these misgivings, Lewis still seems to have allowed Havard to advise him on how to cope with his prostate troubles, including letting Havard design the catheter. The frequent malfunctions of this improvised device caused inconvenience and occasionally chaos to Lewis’s social life, as at an otherwise dull Cambridge sherry party which was enlivened with a shower of his urine.
Lewis’s declining last years were not peaceful. Warnie was increasingly prone to alcoholic binges, alleviated but not cured by the loving ministrations of the nuns of Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda. The sisters appear to have developed a sentimental soft spot for the routinely dipsomanic retired major, treating him with a well-intentioned indulgence that probably only encouraged his addiction. The Kilns was in poor repair, with damp and mould beginning to make their appearance.
14.2 C. S. Lewis’s unpublished letter of 16 January 1961, nominating J. R. R. Tolkien for the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature. Copyright © C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd.
A further concern was the continued cooling of the relationship between Tolkien and Lewis. This, it must be noted, was largely on Tolkien’s side, reflecting his darkening views about Lewis. Yet Lewis never lost his respect or admiration for Tolkien. This is clear from an episode that has only recently come to light. Early in January 1961, Lewis wrote to his former student, the literary scholar Alastair Fowler, who had asked Lewis whether he ought to apply for a chair of English at Exeter University. Lewis told him he should. Then he asked Fowler’s advice. Whom did he think ought to get the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature?722 The reason for this curious request has now become clear.
When the archives of the Swedish Academy for 1961 were opened up to scholars in January 2012, it was discovered that Lewis had nominated Tolkien for the prize.723 As a professor of English literature at the University of Cambridge, Lewis had received an invitation from the Nobel Committee for Literature in late 1960 to nominate someone for the 1961 prize. In his letter of nomination, dated 16 January 1961, Lewis proposed Tolkien, in recognition of his “celebrated romantic trilogy” The Lord of the Rings.724 In the end, the prize went to the Yugoslavian writer Ivo Andriæ (1892–1975). Tolkien’s prose was judged inadequate in comparison with his rivals, which included Graham Greene (1904–1991). Yet Lewis’s proposal of Tolkien for this supreme literary accolade is an important witness to his continued admiration and respect for his friend’s work, despite their increasing personal distance. If Tolkien ever knew about this development (and there is nothing in his correspondence that suggests he did), it did nothing to rebuild his deteriorating relationship with Lewis.
As if this were not enough, both of Davidman’s sons—now entrusted to the care of Lewis and Warnie—had issues which needed to be resolved, not least concerning their schooling. David, apparently suffering a crisis of identity, had decided to become an observant Jew, reaffirming his mother’s religious roots. This obliged Lewis to find kosher food to enable him to meet his new dietary requirements. (Lewis eventually tracked some down at Palm’s Delicatessen in Oxford’s covered market.) Lewis encouraged David’s reassertion of his Jewish roots, including arranging for him to learn Hebrew rather than the more traditional Latin at Magdalen College School. He sought the advice of Oxford University’s Reader in Post-Biblical Jewish Studies, Cecil Roth (1899–1970), about how to accommodate his stepson’s growing commitment to Judaism.725 It was on Roth’s recommendation that David began his studies at North West London Talmudical College in Golders Green, London.
During the spring of 1963, Lewis’s health recovered sufficiently to allow him to spend the L
ent and Easter Terms teaching at Cambridge. By May 1963, he was planning his lectures for the Michaelmas Term. He would deliver a lecture course at Cambridge on medieval literature on Tuesday and Thursday mornings in full term, beginning on 10 October.726
At this point, Lewis developed a friendship which would initially prove to be of critical importance in his final months, and subsequently in reviving interest in him after his death. Lewis had many American admirers with whom he corresponded over the years. One of these was Walter Hooper (1931– ), a junior American academic from the University of Kentucky who had researched his writings and was interested in writing a book on him. Hooper had begun a correspondence with Lewis on 23 November 1954, while serving in the US army, and developed a long-standing interest in Lewis’s work during his subsequent academic career. Hooper had been particularly impressed by a short preface Lewis had contributed to Letters to Young Churches (1947), a contemporary translation of the New Testament Epistles by the English clerical writer J. B. Phillips (1906–1982). Even as early as 1957, Lewis had agreed to meet Hooper if he should ever have cause to visit England.727
In the end, Hooper’s visit was postponed, although their correspondence continued. In December 1962, Hooper sent Lewis a bibliography of Lewis’s published works that he had compiled, which Lewis appreciatively corrected and expanded at several points. He once again agreed to meet with Hooper when Hooper was next in England, and suggested June 1963 as a time when he expected to be at home in Oxford.728 The meeting was finally arranged for 7 June, when Hooper would be in Oxford to attend an International Summer School at Exeter College.
C. S. Lewis – A Life Page 36