by A. N. Wilson
The routine evidently did nothing to diminish his competence as an examinee. Almost his last bit of reading before he sat for English Schools was King Lear, and he made the highly characteristic observation: ‘No critic has noticed what a beastly old man Lear is until he is quite broke.’ At about the same time, Lewis had a dream that Miss Wardale, his Old English tutor, was helping him to escape his own father. There could be no doubt, in either his conscious or subconscious mind, about the likeliness of his success in the English Schools. The papers in the event were surprisingly tough, and Lewis boiled with anger after the exams at what he regarded as a number of unfair questions. ‘Neither for Mods nor Greats did I ever meet cads for lecturers and malicious papers as I have done in this. I hope more than ever for a first if only to defeat the old men.’16 Chief of the old men in the English Faculty that Lewis hated was Percy Simpson, the editor of Ben Jonson. Needless to say, Lewis got his First, in the summer of 1923; but a few years were to pass before he was able to get his revenge on the ‘old men’. Lewis’s philosophy tutor, E. F. Carritt, recounted to him a conversation which had taken place at the high table of Univ. A philosopher who had examined in the Schools remarked to Carritt, ‘One of your young men seems to think Plato is always wrong.’ ‘Oh,’ said Carritt, ‘is it Simpson?’ ‘No.’ ‘Blunt? Hastings?’ ‘No. Man called Lewis, seems an able fellow anyway … ’17
It was one of those apparently trivial exchanges which, once repeated, took on significance. As soon as Carritt had told his pupil about it, Lewis became convinced that he would one day succeed as a professional philosopher. In the eighteen months which followed his triumph in the English Schools, Lewis considered his options. Harwood wrote urging him to consider taking the All Souls exam. Had he done so, he would have won a research fellowship for seven years at a college which had no undergraduates and been able to concentrate on reading and research pure and simple. This was never to be his destiny. For him, reading and writing – the two things which made life worth living – always had to be squeezed in between domestic life and the requirements of teaching. There was the possibility of teaching Philosophy at Trinity College, but that was a job he missed. In the autumn of 1923, in dire need of funds, he undertook to prepare an unpromising ex-schoolboy for the scholarship exam:
LEWIS: Well, S., what Greek authors have you been reading?
BOY (cheerfully): I can never remember. Try a few names and I’ll see if I get any.
LEWIS (a little damped): Have you read any Euripides?
BOY: No.
LEWIS: Any Sophocles?
BOY: Oh yes.
LEWIS: What plays of his have you read?
BOY (after a pause): Well – the Alcestis.
LEWIS (apologetically): But isn’t that by Euripides?
BOY (with genial surprise of a man who finds £1 where he thought there was only a ten-shilling note): Really. Is it now? Then by Jove I have read some Euripides.
In the lives of most teachers there is some such dispiriting exchange. Luckily for Lewis, his old college came to the rescue. Carritt was given a year’s professorship at Ann Arbor University, Michigan, and the new Master of Univ, Sir Michael Sadler, asked Lewis if he would step into the breach and do the teaching. This meant that he had his first job – as a temporary lecturer in philosophy at his old college. Philosophy more than most disciplines thrives on the tutorial system, that is to say, on conversation; and it was during this year when he taught nothing but philosophy that Lewis was able to question whether he still thought that Plato was ‘always wrong’. Among all the popular twentieth-century writers in English, Lewis is conspicuous for the number of times he appears to believe that Plato is right; we must assume that the beginnings of this momentous conversion took place during his discussions with his Univ pupils.
By the following year, 1924, he was considering applying for the Philosophy fellowship at St John’s College, and was going to offer them, in proof of his worth, a dissertation on Bertrand Russell’s Worship of a Free Man. Lewis had been arrested by this book because in its pages ‘I found a very clear and noble statement of what I myself believed a few years ago. But he does not face the real difficulty – that our ideals are after all a natural product, facts with a relation to all other facts, and cannot survive the condemnation of the fact as a whole.’18 Reading Russell, in short, compelled him to reconsider the great questions which had been posed by Socrates and Plato in Athens four centuries BC. What is the Good? If the universe is what the nineteenth-century materialists believed it to be, and if human beings are no more than physical phenomena within it, to be scattered as soon as their brain cells are interfered with or their bodies decay, then how can they attach a hierarchy of significance to the thoughts which pass through their heads? Why are Russell’s ideals any more or less lofty than those of a common criminal? Why are his brilliant discoveries about mathematics of more or less consequence than the mental ramblings of a manual labourer? Once a hierarchy of values is implied, either moral or intellectual, then you are taken outside a purely material realm into that of metaphysics.
The followers and friends of Russell, particularly Ludwig Wittgenstein, and subsequently such popularizers of Wittgenstein’s early thought as A. J. Ayer, saw their way out of this string of difficulties by placing a clear no-entry sign at the turning of the road. ‘The world is that which is the case.’ This did not imply (for Wittgenstein, though it did for Ayer) that metaphysics was all wrong; it merely placed a drastic limitation on what philosophers could meaningfully discuss. The so-called verification principle (familiar in different forms from the time of the Cartesian philosophers in the late seventeenth century) was erected as a great totem before which thinking man was expected to bow down. A statement could not be meaningful unless it was capable of verification by some means external to itself. The only truths which passed this test were statements of a priori acceptability, such as mathematical formulae; and statements relating to our sense data, to the physical universe. The words ‘science’ and ‘scientific’, which had been given an inflated importance in the Victorian period, were now swollen yet further to embrace all truth. Questions of aesthetics, morality, and above all questions of religion were relegated to the scrap heap where language was meaningless. The areas which had concerned the noblest and most agile minds of the previous twenty-three centuries were put on one side as being not merely unimportant but actually nonsensical.
This was the philosophical world into which Lewis was about to step. Mid-twentieth-century logical positivism, with Ayer as its enfant terrible, was yet to flower fully. Russell was a figure who interested Lewis because he appeared to embody a phenomenon which to a lesser degree had been shown forth in old Kirkpatrick: a passionate belief in virtue, without any philosophical justification for his position.
In the year that Lewis was wrestling with these problems in his mind, his friend Barfield was following a very different course. Far from wrestling with Plato, Barfield had gone back to him with alacrity, only via the writings of Rudolph Steiner. Reading Steiner was for Barfield a profound religious awakening; it made ‘the burden roll’ from his back.19 Steiner made Barfield see that there was no need to accept the Darwinian, purely materialistic interpretation of the world. The crude Darwinian view of human consciousness, for example, was that it had somehow or other ‘evolved’ from a succession of increasingly intelligent apes, beginning with a creature who little thought beyond where his next banana was coming from, and culminating in the President of the Royal Society. But this was only a theory and not, on the face of it, a particularly probable one. Steiner recovered from Plato the idea of consciousness and imagination as reflections of the soul or mind outside the human. For Barfield, the words of Coleridge took on new significance when the poet wrote of the imagination as the ‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the Infinite I AM’. The extreme disagreement between Lewis and Barfield on this matter led to the exchange of letters which they came to call The Great War.
Lewis was sufficiently committed to the life of the mind to see that if what Barfield was saying was true, it would profoundly affect everything. There cannot be a greater difference than that between someone who supposes that the human race (and with it all art, philosophy, science and virtue) is a mere atomic accident in a blankly meaningless universe and those who believe that there is a plan, and behind it all a design. Lewis could, as it were, feel the breath of that idea on the back of his neck, and he did not like it. This was an unhappy period of his life, dogged by uncertainty about everything. Barfield’s talk about the burden rolling from his back did not stop Lewis from wanting to hug his own burden.
I woke up late this morning in such a state of misery and depression as I never remember to have had. There was no apparent reason. Really rather ridiculous – I found myself in tears for the first time for many a long day, while dressing … Read Hume’s ‘Of Morals’. This contains nearly all my own fallacies in Ethics – which look more fallacious in another person’s language.20
Were it not for the distressing fact that nearly all his favourite English authors also seemed to arouse the same metaphysical speculations, he would perhaps have been happier teaching English literature. F. P. Wilson, his old tutor, thought very highly of his powers, and had urged him to pursue his studies in a B.Litt or a doctoral thesis. Lewis suggested the idea that he might like to work on ‘a study of the Romantic epic from its beginnings down to Spenser, with a side glance at Ovid’.21 This was far too broad a sweep for the essentially minimal confines of a ‘research degree’, and Wilson urged him to find something narrower. In fact, this idea contained the seeds of his first important book, The Allegory of Love. From the beginning, ‘Heavy’ Lewis was to be a heavyweight in the field of scholarship. Not for him, as for so many scholars, the painstakingly minute study of some small area, the discovery of more and more about less and less. Instead, the broad, general sweep, the bold, big outline, was to be his mode. It was this which would make him such a very satisfying critic for the general reader, as well as an inspired lecturer for generations of undergraduates.
Janie Moore, who worried as much as Lewis did about money and all the ‘humiliations, the hardships and the waste of time that come from poverty’, nevertheless had the insight to be slightly afraid of Lewis’s decision to embark upon the academic life. She saw that teaching could be a grind, and she felt keenly, as Lewis did himself, that ‘the creative years are slipping past me without a chance to get to my real work.’ By this they both meant, Irish as they were, the great work of poetry. They were both preparing for Lewis the great Romantic poet to burst upon the world. The academic jobs were merely a way of paying the rent, unless it transpired that Lewis could find a post which gave him time for his philosophical speculations.
The academic year of 1924 passed by, and no prospect of a job in philosophy materialized. Then a fellowship in English was announced at Magdalen College. Lewis applied, and soon found himself on a shortlist of two. His rival was John Bryson, who later became the English tutor at Balliol College and an expert on portraiture, among other things. Curiously enough, Bryson was also an Ulsterman from Portadown, County Armagh, but it would have been hard to find two men more different. Bryson was an aesthete, a miniaturist, a man who worked by intuition; Lewis was large, bombastic, a dialectician as well as a Romantic. Since Magdalen was looking for a man who would also help with the teaching of philosophy, there could not have been any doubt about which of the two candidates was the more worthy. But dons, particularly dons in committee, are capable of making bizarre choices. Nothing was certain. After the academic interviews had been completed, the two candidates were invited to dine on High Table, so that their manners and conversation could be assessed. Both men were charming company, though in very different styles.
Though both were gentlemen, the dinner was not unfrightening. Lewis consulted Farquharson (the Farq) at Univ and asked him what to wear. He was told ‘white tie and tails’. When he arrived, he found that everyone else around the dinner table was wearing a black tie with dinner jacket. The President of Magdalen, Sir Herbert Warren, had been tutor to the Prince of Wales, and was a byword for grand social ideas. He took to Lewis, and it may well have been this which swayed events in Lewis’s favour.
Magdalen elected him, and the appointment was published in The Times on 20 May 1925. The next day in the local papers at home, the headline was ‘HONOUR FOR BELFAST MAN’. ‘The new Fellow,’ readers were told, ‘whose future career will be followed with great interest by his many friends, is a son of Mr. A.J. Lewis, the well-known Belfast solicitor.’22
The healing of relations with his father was from now onwards one of the most profound requirements of Lewis’s emotional life. So long as he had been dependent on the P’daytabird, he had been unable to love him. His first act on being elected to the Magdalen fellowship was to sit down and write to Albert. Lewis had had an undergraduate career of dazzling success. He had been employed, perfectly honourably, teaching at his old college for a year, and he had now stepped into a prestigious position at one of the largest and most beautiful colleges in Oxford. When he had been anxious to go off on his own and get a job as a lecturer or a schoolmaster the family had held him back and urged him to continue to accept Albert’s support, which was given quite freely and without strings attached. But to Jack, who had spent so much of his time in Janie Moore’s squalid lodgings, the years since the war felt like the strugglings of a friendless pauper.
First, let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous support, extended over six years, which alone has enabled me to hang on like this. In the long course I have seen men at least my equals in ability and qualifications, fall out for the lack of it. ‘How often can I afford to wait?’ was everybody’s question; and few of them had at their back those who were both able and willing to keep them in the field for so long. You have waited, not only without complaint but full of encouragement, while chance after chance slipped away and when the goal receded farthest from sight. Thank you again and again …
In the tone of all this, there is something unnatural. He writes here the words he feels that he ought to write. He does so not for the sake of pure politeness but as an emotional necessity. Something was beginning to happen to him, to his whole relationship with himself and to the way he perceived his own personality, which was to be of momentous consequence.
–NINE–
REDEMPTION BY PARRICIDE
1925–1929
In 1733, the Fellows of Magdalen College, Oxford, erected a large building of simple classical design on the edge of their deer park. To distinguish it from the medieval part of the college which hugs the splendid fifteenth-century cloisters, they called it New Buildings. By 1925, New Buildings had begun to look old and stately. Built from soft Headington stone, and blackened by the soot from college chimneys, it had something of the crumbly, grand appearance of a country house in Ireland. In front of the building was a neatly made formal garden. Behind and all around it was a richly planted park, in which deer grazed. Beyond it, to the east, was a meadow, thick with fritillaries in spring and surrounded by a wooded path, known (after the essayist and moralist who was a fellow of the College in the early eighteenth century) as Addison’s Walk. There can be few more beautiful places in Europe. C. S. Lewis was given rooms in New Buildings and moved in shortly after the end of the summer term, 1925. He had expected to be given the rooms furnished by the College. He had no money in his bank account, and when he gazed about at the huge drawing-room, smaller inner drawing-room and large bedroom, he had no idea how he was to find the money to buy the barest essentials – a few chairs, a table, a bed. All that met his eye was the linoleum on the floor which the College bursar, in a spirit of generosity, said that he could keep.
The bed was necessary, because Lewis intended to sleep in the College, at least during the week in term-time. Why not? He was a bachelor, and this was certainly expected of him by his colleagues. The modern
habit of Oxford dons’ merely coming into their colleges to teach, and perhaps lunch, before cycling or driving home to their wives and children had not caught on. Most fellows would have dined in college on most nights, whether they were married or not; and the huge majority were still bachelors for whom the celibate life was the norm.
Lewis was now twenty-seven years old. Mrs Moore was fifty-three. Maureen Moore was nineteen, and when she had finished her qualifications she would become a music teacher. There was no question of Lewis abandoning the Moores, but the body does not always believe the evidence of its senses; and from this time onwards Minto (as Lewis had begun to call Janie, after a variety of sweet to which she was devoted) began to develop a series of psychosomatic conditions which strengthened the ties binding him to her side. A holiday on Exmoor in the course of that summer was dogged by her rheumatism. If it kept her awake all night, then it was only right that she should wake up Jack for fresh hot-water bottles to be applied to the afflicted areas. They consulted a doctor who told them that there was very little that could be done for a rheumatic attack.1