C. S. Lewis – A Life

by Alister McGrath

  Lewis clearly enjoyed meeting Hooper, and invited him to come along to the next meeting of the Inklings the following Monday. These meetings now took place on the other side of St. Giles, the Inklings having reluctantly transferred from the Eagle and Child to the Lamb and Flag, following renovations which had ruined the privacy and intimacy of the “Rabbit Room.”729 Since Lewis had to be in residence at Magdalene College during term time, the meetings now took place on Mondays, allowing Lewis to take the afternoon “Cantab Crawler” to Cambridge. Hooper, who was an Episcopalian at this point, accompanied Lewis to church at Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, on Sunday mornings.

  Final Illness and Death

  Lewis had intended to travel to Ireland in late July 1963 to visit Arthur Greeves. Aware of his declining physical strength, Lewis had arranged for Douglas Gresham to join them, partly to help carry his luggage. On 7 June, when Lewis returned to Oxford at the end of Cambridge’s summer term, Warnie had left for Ireland, assuming that Lewis would join him during the following month. But it was not to be. Lewis’s health deteriorated sharply in the first week of July.

  On 11 July, Lewis reluctantly wrote to Greeves to cancel his trip. He had had a “collapse as regards the heart trouble.”730 Lewis was now tired, unable to concentrate, and prone to falling asleep. His kidneys were not functioning properly, allowing toxins to build up in his bloodstream, causing him fatigue. The only solution was blood transfusions, which temporarily eased the situation. (The general use of kidney dialysis still lay some years in the future.)

  When Walter Hooper arrived at The Kilns on the morning of Sunday, 14 July 1963 to take Lewis to church, he realised that Lewis was seriously ill. Lewis was exhausted, scarcely able to hold a cup of tea in his hands, and seemed to be in a state of confusion. Worried about his failure to maintain his correspondence in his brother’s extended absence, Lewis invited Hooper to become his personal secretary. Hooper was already signed up to teach a course in Kentucky that fall, but agreed to take the position in January 1964. Lewis, however, possibly confused and unable to concentrate fully, failed to explain what kind of financial arrangement he had in mind to recompense Hooper for his work, or what formal expectations he had for his new employee.

  On the morning of Monday, 15 July, Lewis wrote a short letter to Mary Willis Shelburne, explaining how he had lost all mental concentration, and would be going into the hospital that afternoon for an examination and evaluation of his condition.731 Lewis arrived at the Acland Nursing Home at five o’clock that afternoon, and suffered a heart attack almost immediately after his arrival. He fell into a coma, and was judged to be close to death. The Acland informed Austin and Katharine Farrer, having failed in their efforts to contact Lewis’s next of kin—Warnie.732

  The next day, Austin Farrer made the decision that Lewis, who was being kept alive with an oxygen mask, would wish to receive the last rites. He arranged for Michael Watts, curate of the Church of St. Mary Magdalen, a few minutes’ walk from the Acland Nursing Home, to visit Lewis for this purpose. At 2.00 p.m., Watts administered the last rites. An hour later, to the astonishment of the medical team, Lewis awoke from his coma and asked for a cup of tea, apparently unaware that he had been unconscious for the better part of a day.

  Lewis later told his friends that he wished he had died during the coma. The “whole experience,” he later wrote to Cecil Harwood, was “very gentle.” It seemed a shame, “having reached the gate so easily, not to be allowed through.”733 Like Lazarus, he would have to die again. In a more extended comment in his final letter to his confidant Arthur Greeves, he remarked:

  Tho’ I am by no means unhappy I can’t help feeling it was rather a pity I did revive in July. I mean, having been glided so painlessly up to the Gate it seems hard to have it shut in one’s face and know that the whole process must some day be gone thro’ again, and perhaps far less pleasantly! Poor Lazarus! But God knows best.734

  Lewis had remained in regular correspondence with Greeves since June 1914—one of the most significant and intimate relationships of his life, which few of his circle knew anything about until the publication of Surprised by Joy revealed their youthful friendship (though not its prolonged extension into the present). Characteristically, Lewis apologised for the consequences of his condition: “It looks as if you and I shall never meet again in this life.”

  Although Lewis enjoyed two days of mental clarity after awakening from his coma, he then entered a dark period of “dreams, illusions, and some moments of tangled reason.”735 On 18 July, the day on which these delusions began, Lewis was visited by George Sayer, who was disturbed to find him so very confused. Lewis told Sayer that he had just been appointed Charles Williams’s literary executor, and urgently needed to find a manuscript hidden under Mrs. Williams’s mattress. The problem was that Mrs. Williams wanted a vast sum of money for the manuscript, and Lewis didn’t have the ten thousand pounds she was demanding. When Lewis began to talk about Mrs. Moore as if she were still alive, Sayer realised that Lewis was delusional. When Lewis then told him that he had asked Walter Hooper to be his temporary secretary to handle his correspondence, Sayer not unreasonably assumed this was also a delusion.736

  Once Sayer realised that there really was a Walter Hooper, outside the dark hallucinatory realm that Lewis was occupying at that time, and that Hooper would be able to help look after Lewis, he decided that he ought to travel to Ireland to track down Warnie. In the end, Warnie turned out to be in such a bad state of alcohol poisoning that he was incapable of understanding what had happened to Lewis, let alone contributing to the amelioration of the situation. Sayer returned alone to Oxford.

  On 6 August, Lewis was allowed to return to The Kilns, under the care of Alec Ross, a nurse provided by the Acland. Ross was used to caring for wealthy patients in their well-appointed homes, and was shocked by the squalid conditions he found at The Kilns, particularly its filthy kitchen. A major cleanup began, to make the house habitable. Lewis was forbidden to climb stairs, and so had to be accommodated on the ground floor. Hooper took over Lewis’s old upstairs bedroom and acted as secretary to Lewis. Among the more pathetic missives Hooper wrote on behalf of Lewis at this point were Lewis’s letters of resignation from his chair at Cambridge University and his fellowship at Magdalene College.

  But how was Lewis to move all his books from Cambridge? He was totally unable to travel. On 12 August, Lewis wrote to Jock Burnet, the bursar of Magdalene College, informing him that Walter Hooper would be coming to Cambridge on his behalf to remove all the possessions from his room. The following day, Lewis penned an even more pathetic missive, telling Burnet that he was free to sell anything that remained. Walter Hooper and Douglas Gresham turned up at Magdalene on 14 August, armed with seven pages of detailed instructions from Lewis concerning his possessions. It took them two days to sort things out. On 16 August, they returned to The Kilns in a truck containing thousands of books, which were stacked in piles on the floor until space could be found for them in bookcases.

  In September, Hooper returned to the United States to resume his teaching responsibilities, leaving Lewis to be cared for by Paxford and Mrs. Molly Miller, Lewis’s housekeeper. Lewis was clearly anxious about his own situation. Where was Warnie, and when would he return? Sadly, Lewis concluded that Warnie had “completely deserted” him, despite knowing the seriousness of his condition. “He has been in Ireland since June and doesn’t even write, and is, I suppose, drinking himself to death.”737 Warnie had still not returned by 20 September, when Lewis wrote a somewhat furtive letter to Hooper to clarify the nature of his future employment.

  It is clear that Lewis had not given proper thought to what he wished Hooper to do in his role as his private secretary, nor how he would pay for this.738 When Hooper wrote to broach the subject of a salary for his proposed employment, Lewis somewhat shamefacedly confessed that he just didn’t have the funds to pay him, offering plausible yet weak excuses. Having resigned his chair, he no longer had a salary. And what i
f one of the Gresham boys needed money?739 Having Hooper as a “paid secretary” would be a luxury that he just couldn’t afford. But if Hooper could afford to come over in June 1964, he would be most welcome. The unspoken assumption seems to have been that Hooper would be funding himself.

  We see here one of the matters that preyed heavily on Lewis’s mind after the resignation of his Cambridge chair—money. Lewis continued to live in fear of tax demands that he might not be able to pay. His income was limited to royalties from his books. This was quite substantial at the time; yet Lewis was convinced that they would soon decline as interest in his works waned. His anxieties about his financial future were clearly fuelled in September by his loneliness. He had no soul mate with whom to share his worries.

  A month later, Lewis wrote again to Hooper, bringing the good news that Warnie had finally returned.740 Lewis, it soon became clear, was still anxious about his finances. He was not sure what he could pay Hooper—if anything. His best offer was that Hooper could live at The Kilns, where they would have to share a fire and a table. Then there was the problem of Warnie, who might resent Hooper’s presence. The most Lewis could afford to pay Hooper was five pounds a week—fourteen dollars.741 It was hardly an attractive prospect. In the end, however, Hooper agreed to come. His arrival was scheduled for the first week of January 1964.742

  In the middle of November, Lewis received a letter from Oxford University which can be seen as a sign—if a sign were indeed needed—marking a rehabilitation of his reputation there. He was invited to deliver the Romanes Lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre, perhaps the most prestigious of Oxford University’s public lectures. With great regret, Lewis asked Warnie to write a “very polite refusal.”743

  Friday, 22 November 1963, began as usual in the Lewis household, Warnie later recalled: after they had breakfast, they turned to the routine answering of letters, and tried to solve the crossword puzzle. Warnie noted that Lewis seemed tired after lunch, and suggested that he go to bed. At 4.00, Warnie brought him a cup of tea, and found him “drowsy but comfortable.” At 5.30, Warnie heard a “crash” from Lewis’s bedroom. He ran in to find Lewis collapsed, unconscious, at the foot of the bed. A few moments later, Lewis died.744 His death certificate would give the multiple causes of his death as renal failure, prostate obstruction, and cardiac degeneration.

  At that same time, President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade left Dallas’s Love Field Airport, beginning its journey downtown. An hour later, Kennedy was fatally wounded by a sniper. He was pronounced dead at Parkland Memorial Hospital. Media reports of Lewis’s death were completely overshadowed by the substantially more significant tragedy that unfolded that day in Dallas.

  Warnie was overwhelmed by his brother’s death, which triggered another alcoholic binge. He refused to let anyone know when the funeral was taking place.745 In the end, Douglas Gresham and others telephoned a few key friends to let them know the arrangements. While Warnie spent Tuesday, 26 November in bed drinking whisky, others gathered on that cold, frosty, sunlit morning to bury Lewis at Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, Oxford. There was no funeral procession into the church; Lewis’s coffin had been brought to the church the previous evening. No public announcement was made of the funeral. It was a private affair, attended by Lewis’s circle of friends—including Barfield, Tolkien, Sayer, and the president of Magdalen College. The service was led by the vicar of Holy Trinity, Ronald Head. Austin Farrer read the lesson. There being no immediate family present, the small funeral procession from the church into the graveyard was headed by Maureen Blake746 and Douglas Gresham, who followed the candle bearers and processional cross into the churchyard, where the freshly dug grave awaited them.747

  14.3 The inscription on Lewis’s gravestone in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, Oxford.

  The rather melancholic text Warnie chose for his brother’s gravestone was that displayed on the Shakespearean calendar in Little Lea on the day of their mother’s death in August 1908: “Men must endure their going hence.” Yet perhaps some of Lewis’s own words, penned a few months earlier, capture both his style and his hope in the face of his inevitable death somewhat better than this severe and forbidding epitaph. We are, Lewis suggested, like

  a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking. I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming.748

  CHAPTER 15

  The Lewis Phenomenon

  Towards the end of his life, Lewis remarked to Walter Hooper that he expected to be forgotten within five years of his death. That was the judgement of many in the 1960s, who saw Lewis as hopelessly wedded to the cultural outlook of an earlier generation. Cometh the hour, cometh the man—yet Lewis’s hour now seemed to lie in the past. The “High Sixties” (1960–1973) witnessed rapid cultural change, as a rising younger generation sought to distance themselves from the culture and values of their parents.749 And Lewis was on the wrong side of that watershed.

  The 1960s: A Fading Star

  In 1965, Chad Walsh (1914–1991), the American literary scholar who published the first book on Lewis in 1949, declared that Lewis’s influence was now “on the wane in America.”750 Lewis’s rise to fame in the United States was linked with the wartime revival of interest in religious questions, which persisted until late in the 1950s—but then began to fade. During the 1960s, religious interest and concern switched from theoretical questions to practical issues. Lewis seemed “much too theoretical and abstract” to the younger generation. He had little to say in the face of the great debates of that age—the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, and the “death of God.”

  Lewis was beached, as the tide that had brought him to prominence receded in the 1960s. This was the wisdom of that turbulent age. In its obituary for Lewis, Time magazine declared him to be “one of the church’s minor prophets,” a defender of the faith who “with fashionable urbanity justified an unfashionable orthodoxy against the heresies of his time.”751 But the tone of the obituary was that of marking his passing, not anticipating his resurrection. Lewis would be remembered as “an impressive scholar”—by those who looked backwards.

  15.1 Lewis at home at The Kilns in 1960. This is one of the best-known images of the later Lewis. It depicts him sitting at his desk, complete with the materials he used when writing—on the left, a large cup of tea, a bottle of Quink ink, an ashtray, and a box of matches; on the right, a pipe, a tin of tobacco, and a second box of matches.

  So what lay ahead? Walsh was rightly cautious here, warning it was not possible to determine what Lewis’s future standing in America might be. Walsh’s own hunch was that Lewis’s more “straightforward books”—such as Mere Christianity—would dwindle in their appeal. After all, such works of “religious journalism” appealed primarily to their own day and age. Walsh, himself a literary scholar, suggested that Lewis’s “more imaginative books”—such as his “superb series of seven Narnia novels for children”—might live on, and “become a permanent part of the literary and religious heritage.” Yet that would lie in the future, if it were to happen at all. For the moment, Lewis was entering a period of “relative obscurity.”752

  Lewis had indeed few champions in North America during the 1960s. Lewis was then read and advocated chiefly by Episcopalians—such as Chad Walsh and Walter Hooper—even though there were signs of an emerging interest on the part of some influential Catholics. Evangelicals—a growing religious constituency in the United States during the 1960s—clearly regarded him with suspicion, in that he violated both their social norms and their religious concerns. Theologically, evangelicals had little in common with Lewis, who offered a literary explanation of the observed centrality of the Bible to the Christian faith, not a theological defence of its right to occupy that place. Apart from a loose connection with the Oxford Pastorate through the Socra
tic Club, Lewis did not associate with British evangelicals, even in Oxford or Cambridge. In the year of Lewis’s death, Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981), one of the most influential British evangelical preachers of that time, pronounced him to be unsound on a number of issues, chiefly relating to the doctrine of salvation.753

  Lewis seemed a total outsider to American evangelicals in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when most within the movement regarded even watching movies as spiritually dangerous. What evangelical would want to be associated with someone who smoked heavily, drank copious quantities of beer, and held views on the Bible, the Atonement, and purgatory which were out of place in the evangelical community of that age? While some evangelicals warmed to Lewis’s apologetic writings in the 1960s, most regarded him with distrust.

  It would be unfair to suggest that Lewis was written off by 1970. Perhaps a more reliable judgement would be that the surging tide that had once swept Lewis to public attention now withdrew, seemingly leaving him washed up and beached. Lewis was not discredited; he was simply sidelined. The rebirth of interest in religious questions between 1942 and 1957, which originally brought Lewis to prominence, was replaced by a new cultural mood that was inclined to reject religion as an outdated habit of thought and practice and was anxious to break free from any lingering influence of the past. The great sociological predictions of the 1960s envisaged religion as losing its intellectual and social traction. A secular age lay ahead.