by A. N. Wilson
These distractions did nothing to impair Lewis’s academic achievements, and he began his first term as an undergraduate at Oxford. It might readily be supposed that there was a tremendous contrast between the total solitude of Great Bookham and the merry life of Oxford; but by its own standards Oxford was strangely deserted. At Univ there were only twelve men in college32 and the hall was no longer used for dinner. The students ate in a small lecture room. Lewis was given an enormous sitting room all for himself. It was thickly carpeted with a profusion of rugs and furnished in stupendous style, with richly carved oak tables and a grand piano. A fire was burning in the grate, and his scout (college servant) had put the kettle on to boil on a gas ring. This was his first glimpse of college life. The room he had been given, including its furniture, belonged to ‘a tremendous blood who is at the front’.33
For the reason Oxford was so empty was that it was 1917, and nearly all the young men were in Flanders and France, fighting in the trenches. The war was going badly for the Allies, and conscription had by now been introduced. Since he was an Irishman, Lewis was not obliged to enlist, but he volunteered to do so. This meant that, although he was technically a student, he was in effect a trainee officer in the British Army. The Dean of the college refused to map out any plan of reading for Lewis ‘on the grounds that the Corps will take me all my time’.
Still, in that first Oxford term at Univ, there was a chance to wander about and drink in the atmosphere of the place. One alumnus of the college had been Percy Bysshe Shelley – another atheist poet. He had actually been sent down from Oxford for his atheism, but after his death the college had accepted a remarkable statue of him which is housed beneath a blue dome. Lewis believed that Greeves would have loved it. ‘I pass it every morning on the way to my bath. On a slab of black marble, carved underneath with weeping muses, lies in white stone the nude figure of Shelley, as he was cast up by the sea – all tossed into curious attitudes with lovely ripples of muscle and strained limbs. He is lovely.’ Then – since the thought of naked loveliness will obviously raise the question of whether Lewis has masturbated recently, he adds, ‘No – not since I came back. Somehow I haven’t thought of it.’
As well as naked figures in marble, there were naked figures in the flesh at ‘Parson’s Pleasure’, a stretch of the River Cherwell where men could bathe ‘without the tiresome convention of bathing things’. It was to be one of his favourite spots for many years to come. And, as well as the newly discovered delights of architecture, there were libraries and bookshops such as he had never known before.
It was a beautifully, unreally happy first term, made the more poignant by the knowledge that sooner or later training would start in earnest and he would be sent off to the Western Front. On 3 June, he passed Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, in the street and would dearly have loved to speak to him.34 But by 10 June term was over and he was moved to Keble College, which had been requisitioned as a military barracks. ‘It is a great change to leave my own snug room at Univ for a carpetless room, with beds without sheets or pillows, kept miserably tidy and shared with another cadet, at Keble,’ he wrote. The other cadet was a schoolboy who had only just left Clifton College in Bristol. Like Lewis, he was an Irishman, but that was not the reason he had been put to share with him. It was simply that their names came together on the alphabetical list. The other cadet, ‘though he was a little too childish’, was ‘quite a good fellow’. His name was Edward Francis Courtenay Moore, known to his friends as Paddy. Lewis could not possibly have guessed that this purely casual arrangement was to be one of the most important things which ever happened to him, something which was to shape and influence the rest of his life.
–SIX–
THE ANGEL OF PAIN
1917–1918
Lewis and the other boys were about to take part in trench warfare. The training they received was heartlessly casual. After only a few weeks’ drill at Keble, he was given some leave and returned to Univ, the only man in the college. ‘I spent a long time wandering over it, into all sorts of parts where I had never been before, where the mullioned windows are dark with ivy that no one has bothered to cut since the war emptied the rooms they belong to. Some of these rooms were dust-sheeted, others were much as their owners had left them … ’ The important thing was that he did not go home to Ireland during this spell of leave. There were reasons for that. The journey, properly speaking, took two days. The Irish channel was patrolled by U-boats and there was the danger of the packet being hit by a torpedo. But the most important reason was that he did not love his father, and he did not want to go home. Albert Lewis, for his part, though worried sick, and angry that Jack’s brilliant career should be interrupted by the demands of soldiering, could not stir himself to visit his son in Oxford, even though Jack more than once invited him. Albert had a dread which was almost pathological of leaving the office routines. He hated travel. Also, unknown at this point to either of his sons, he had started to drink very heavily. He contented himself with writing letters to his Member of Parliament, Colonel Craig, trying to get Jack transferred to the Royal Artillery.
It was natural, at this anxious period when the comforts of a true home were precisely what a boy needed, that Jack should have happily joined in with Paddy Moore’s people who visited him regularly from Bristol: his twelve-year-old sister Maureen and his mother Janie, a pretty blonde Irishwoman of forty-five. In August, Warnie got a short spell of leave from the Western Front, and Jack was persuaded to go back to Strandtown to spend the week with him. He had reached the point where he could not bear to see his father à deux, but with his still-loved brother it was a different matter. On 21 August, Warnie went back to France and Jack returned to Oxford for his only piece of practical training for trench warfare – a three-day bivouac in Wytham Woods. It was wet weather – ‘Our model trenches up there will provide a very unnecessarily good imitation of Flanders mud,’ he quipped to his father. To read on the boat, the P’daytabird had lent him a novel called The Angel of Pain by E. F. Benson which he now wanted back. ‘I will send you the Angel of Pain in a few days: just at present my friend Mrs. Moore has borrowed it.’1
Albert could not possibly have guessed that from now onwards Mrs Moore’s presence at Jack’s side was to be almost constant. At the end of September he got a month’s leave, and chose to spend nearly all of it with Paddy Moore and his family at 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. ‘On Monday, a cold (complete with sore throat) which I had developed at Oxford went on so merrily that Mrs. Moore took my temperature and put me to bed,’ he wrote home. When the cold was better, he only had a week in which to dash home and see his father.
The experience of being mothered, for the first time in his life since he was nine years old, was having a profound effect on Jack. The feelings of affection were not one-sided. Jack’s personality, which had so charmed Kirkpatrick, was also having a strong effect on Mrs Moore.
That October, Paddy Moore and Lewis were parted. Lewis was gazetted to the Somerset Light Infantry and Paddy was assigned to a different regiment. But it was obvious that the links between Mrs Moore and Lewis were not to be severed. She wrote to Albert, ‘Your boy, of course, being Paddy’s room mate, we know much better than the others, and he was quite the most popular boy of the party; he is very charming and most likeable, and won golden opinions from everyone … ’ But from no one more than from Janie Moore herself. Where was Mr Moore, whom she referred to as ‘The Beast’? Somewhere in Ireland, it was thought. Jack was given to understand that he had treated her badly and failed to give her enough money. The Lewis family knew nothing of this and assumed that Mrs Moore was a widow.
They had no idea that there was any crisis brewing in Jack’s life either of an emotional or of a practical character. In fact, he was about to be sent off to war. The call came in November. He was given forty-eight hours’ leave, after which he would be sent to France. Naturally, he went to Bristol to stay with Mrs Moore, and telegraphed to his father: ‘HAVE AR
RIVED IN BRISTOL ON 48 HOURS LEAVE. REPORT SOUTHAMPTON SATURDAY, CAN YOU COME BRISTOL? IF SO MEET AT STATION. REPLY MRS MOORE’S ADDRESS 56 RAVENSWOOD ROAD REDLANDS BRISTOL.’ To many parents, the significance of ‘REPORT SOUTHAMPTON SATURDAY’ would have been obvious: Southampton was where the troopships sailed from. But to Irish Albert, who had never sailed from Southampton, only from Liverpool or Belfast, the words meant nothing. He could not allow himself to believe that the words meant what they said. So he wired back ‘DONT UNDERSTAND TELEGRAM, PLEASE WRITE. P.’ By letter Jack spelt it all out. ‘Forty-eight hours is no earthly use to a person who lives in Ireland and would have to spend two days and nights travelling. Please don’t worry. I shall probably be a long time at the base as I have had so little training in England.’
By the time this letter reached Strandtown, Jack was in France. Albert found the news overwhelming. ‘It has shaken me to pieces.’ He did not realize how it had shaken Jack, nor how his failure to come and say goodbye at that crucial emotional moment had helped to sever a few more threads of affection binding the son to his father and to his home. He could not have seen how much the shape of things to come was foreshadowed in the hasty scribble which he held in his hand as he trudged, half-drunk, from one empty room to the other at Little Lea. ‘Can’t write more now,’ Jack had said, ‘must go and do some shopping.‘ There can have been few other young officers in the British Isles at that period who, with only hours to spare before leaving for an almost certain death in the trenches, were required to perform menial domestic tasks. But it was to be part of Lewis’s relationship with Mrs Moore from the beginning that he ‘must go and do some shopping’.
By the time of his nineteenth birthday, he was in the front-line trenches, near the village of Arras. Christmas was spent there. Back at Little Lea, Albert spent the day alone. He went to the early service at St Mark’s. ‘At times I was unable to repeat the responses. It is something more than sentiment and early associations that comforts a sorrowful man in this Holy Eucharist and leads him to look forward with firmer faith to the safety and salvation of those he loves … ’2 He nevertheless felt furious with Jack for not responding to Colonel Craig’s attempts to get the boy transferred to an artillery regiment. Jack, however, had his reasons. ‘I must confess that I have become very attached to this regiment. I have several friends whom I should be sorry to leave and I am just beginning to know my men and understand the work.’
School had been a nightmare which everyone expected him to enjoy. No one pretended that you should enjoy the Army, and this mysteriously made it more bearable.3 He found the camaraderie of the men, and of the senior officers, who were not in the least like the bloods of Malvern, much more to his taste. Even the ‘dugouts’ were not as bad as he had feared. ‘They are very deep, you go down them by a shaft of about 20 steps; they have wire bunks where a man can sleep quite snugly and braziers for warmth and cooking.’4 The trenches were also a place where ‘a man’, at least this man, could read. That January found him deeply absorbed in ‘Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss, which I like even better’.
In February, he went down with trench fever, or pyrexia – with a high temperature, and many of the symptoms of influenza. He was transferred to the Red Cross Hospital at Treport and wrote home for ‘some cheap edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy’.5 The hospital was a converted hotel, and the discovery of clean sheets, pretty nurses and above all books was very welcome to the patient. The only drawback to the place was that his room-mate was conducting a love affair with one of the nurses, and kept him awake. ‘I had too high a temperature to be embarrassed but the human whisper is a very tedious and unmusical noise.’6 When the amorous room-mate departed, Lewis was left on his own and read a volume of G. K. Chesterton’s essays. Here, too, was to be a great influence, almost comparable in scale and importance with George MacDonald; but for the time being he merely enjoyed Chesterton as a wit and stylist, without being quite aware of what it was that he was swallowing with the thrusts and paradoxes. ‘A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.’7
Once he was better, he had to put his books down and return to the Front. On one occasion, he took sixty German prisoners – ‘that is, discovered to my great relief that the crowd of field-grey figures who suddenly appeared from nowhere all had their hands up’.8 He now began to taste the horror of the war. The corpses everywhere recalled the deadness of his dead mother. Days were passed squelching in thigh-length gumboots through the mud while facing enemy fire. Almost as much as the bullets, the soldiers dreaded the barbed wire. Merely to tear your boot on the wire was to fill it with muddy water. As the spring days advanced, the Germans increased their offensive, determined to make one last grand Wagnerian gesture of defiance against their almost inevitable defeat. During the battle of Arras on 15 April 1918, Lewis was on Mount Bernenchon. He was standing near his dear friend Sergeant Ayres when a shell exploded. It killed Ayres outright and the splinters from it hit Lewis in the leg, the hand, the face and just under the arm. This last splinter touched his lung and momentarily winded him. When he found that he was not breathing, he concluded that this was death. The intelligence dawned on him dully – inspiring neither fear nor courage. In fact, it was not death but that fate which all English soldiers coveted – a wound not of great gravity, but sufficiently serious to remove the victim from the scene of conflict: in other words, ‘a Blighty’.
After a short spell in the Liverpool Merchants’ Mobile Hospital, Étaples, he was taken home, and by 25 May he was able to wire to his father: AM IN ENDSLEIGH PALACE HOSPITAL ENDSLEIGH GARDENS LONDON. JACK. He followed up the telegram with a letter asking his father to come over and visit him for a few days. Albert was himself laid up with severe bronchitis at the time. Even so, given the fact (repeatedly revealed in his surviving diaries) that he was desperately worried about his boy, it is remarkable that he was unable to stir himself for a hospital visit when the bronchitis was clear.
Mrs Moore was not so diffident, and came to London at once to be near Jack. She was extremely worried about the fate of her own son, Paddy, who had been reported ‘missing’. Before they had been separated and sent off to different regiments, Paddy and Jack had made a pact: in the event of one or the other’s death, the survivor would ‘look after’ the bereft parent of the one who had been killed. Mrs Moore’s daughter Maureen distinctly remembered this solemn undertaking being made by the two eighteen-year-old boys.9
To what extent Paddy Moore would have been a welcome guest at Little Lea in the event of Jack’s death, let alone able to ‘look after’ Albert Lewis, was never put to the test, for it was Moore who was lost, and Lewis who survived. After a few weeks in the Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Jack was well enough to get up, and he took the opportunity for a Sunday outing from London to Great Bookham.
Even to go to Waterloo was an adventure full of memories, and every station I passed on the way down seemed to clear away another layer of time that had passed, and bring me back to the old life. Bookham was at its best; a mass of green, very pleasing to one ‘that has been long in city pent’ … I opened the gate of Kirk’s garden almost with stealth, and went on past the house to the vegetable garden and the little wild orchard with the pond where I had sat so often on hot Sunday afternoons, and there among the cabbages in his shirt and Sunday trousers, sure enough, was the old man, still digging and smoking his horrible pipe … 10
The Kirkpatricks welcomed home the wounded soldier; Mrs Moore had welcomed him; but Albert still did nothing. One explanation may be found in a little incident which occurred several months later when Arthur Greeves happened to call at Little Lea and put his head round the study door. He found Albert slumped in a chair, very red in the face. ‘I’m in great trouble, you’d better go away,’ he said. Jack’s harsh gloss on this sentence was, ‘No evidence as to what this “great trouble” was has ever been forthcoming so I think we may with probability if not quite certainty breathe the magic word ALCOHOL.’1
1 He was still a boy. Alcohol was still a subject of mirth. Its nightmares – very forceful in his family – lay in the future.
It would not appear that Greeves said anything about Albert’s peculiar behaviour in his letters to Jack. The two friends were back to ‘normal’ as correspondents, swapping opinions about books, while from Greeves’s side there were confidences about his emotional and sexual preferences. Before going to the wars, Lewis had expanded upon his own taste, in imagination at least, for sado-masochism, and a fellow-Irishman called Butler, an old boy of Campbell College, had put him on to the Marquis de Sade. Arthur’s tastes were still developing along homosexual lines. From Endsleigh Palace Hospital, Lewis had written to him, ‘I admit the associations of the word paederasty are unfortunate but you should rise above that.’12
How far Lewis was able to indulge any of his sexual tastes must remain something of a mystery. We are at a point in his life where in his own account of the matter a great but almost exhibitionistic silence is observed. ‘One huge and complex episode’, he wrote in Surprised by Joy, ‘will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged.’13 That he fell in love with Mrs Moore, and she with him – probably during the period when she was visiting him in hospital, and frantic with worry about Paddy – cannot be in doubt. Neither of them was a Christian believer, nor were they bound by any code of morality which would have forbidden them to become lovers in the fullest sense of the word. True, she was still married to the Beast, and would go on being married to him for the duration of her long association with C. S. Lewis. While nothing will ever be proved on either side, the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs Moore were not lovers – probably from the summer of 1918 onwards. ‘When I came first to the University,’ Lewis tells us with typical hyperbole, ‘I was as nearly without a moral conscience as a boy could be … of chastity, truthfulness and self-sacrifice, I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music.’14