by A. N. Wilson
Beneath this exterior something was going to have to ‘give’ if Lewis was to survive. Shortly before he admitted what was happening to him, he re-read the Hippolytus of Euripides. He did so for no particular reason; it was just an impulse. The theme of the play (as Lewis somehow expects all readers of his memoirs to remember) is the rejection and suppression of erotic love. Phaedra, the all-powerful matriarch, conceives a wild passion for her stepson Hippolytus, who rejects her love with speeches hostile not just to her but to the whole erotic faculty. In her grief, she kills herself. When the father of Hippolytus, Theseus, returns from his travels, he is unable to believe that no sexual congress has taken place between his wife and his son. He banishes Hippolytus and prays for his death, which is granted when Poseidon sends a sea monster to upturn the young man’s chariot. Too late, Theseus learns that his son loved and was loyal to him after all. This is a play in which the priggish young hide their emotions while their elders give themselves up to extremes of passion. It is also a play in which mortals are seen as figures of infinite pathos in a universe controlled by the whims of a cruel fate and a capricious deity.
Reading the play almost shattered Lewis. His decision, since the madness of Doc Askins, to live without the emotions, was one that he realized was impossible. ‘There was a transitional moment of delicious uneasiness and then – instantaneously – the long inhibition was over, the dry desert lay behind, I was off once more into the land of longing, my heart at once broken and exalted as it had never been since the old days at Bookham.’18
He began to feel himself approached by God, and in the summer of 1929 went through a mystical experience. As befitted a man who had sung the pleasures of the ordinary, it occurred on a bus going up Headington Hill, on his way back to Mrs Moore’s house. There were no words in the experience, but he became aware of the fact that he was keeping something at bay; or another way of looking at it would be that he was wearing some rigid outer clothing, like corsets or a suit of armour. In his moment of illumination on the bus, Lewis felt that he could either remain encased in this shell, or he could take it off. After this strange sensation he felt as if he were a snowman ‘at last beginning to melt’.
Some time in that summer of 1929, in his college rooms at Magdalen, he ‘gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed; perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England’.19
The ‘conversion’ was a recognition that God was God. It was not a conversion to Christianity. He writes about it in unforgettably dramatic terms and with the sublime egoism (to use the word purely, with no pejorative sense) of a man alone with God. He really was, at that moment, one for whom there were ‘two and two only supreme and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator’, as Newman described his own experience. Since Lewis was to go on to become a faithful and devoted Christian, he writes rather as if the ‘conversion’ were a fait accompli, after which nothing could be the same. But men have had such experiences and done nothing further about them, either because they have decided that there was less to the experience than they at first supposed, or because they could not endure the ethical and spiritual demands which were implied in the unspoken, ineffable moment of divine knowledge.
That summer, however, events were to place a seal on what happened to Lewis in his Magdalen rooms. It is probably fanciful to cast Mrs Moore as Phaedra, or the P’daytabird as Theseus, but now Lewis was crossing the sea to see his father for the last time. A great emotional business was reaching its climax.
Lewis continued, throughout life, to be obsessed not only by his father, but also by the possibility that his life could be interpreted in a purely Freudian way. ‘In those days, the new psychology was just beginning to make itself felt in the circles I most frequented in Oxford,’ he told readers of the 1950 reprint of Dymer. Much earlier, at the time of ‘the Doc’s insanity’ in 1923, Lewis had written to Greeves, ‘Arthur, whatever you do never allow yourself to get a neurosis.’ This piece of advice might suggest that his grasp of the ‘new psychology’ was still at the rudimentary stage, since he speaks of a neurosis as if it were something avoidable. The letter is interesting, though, for the light it casts on his rooted dread of mental imbalance, and on his horrified feeling that the unsatisfactory relations which had existed between himself and his father since early adolescence might somehow mar him for the rest of his life:
You and I are both qualified for it [neurosis] because we were both afraid of our fathers as children. The Doctor who came to see the poor Doc (a psychoanalyst and neurological specialist) said that every neurotic case went back to the childish fear of the father. But it can be avoided. Keep clear of introspection, of brooding, of spiritualism, of everything eccentric. Keep to work and sanity and open air – to the cheerful and the matter of fact side of things.20
This was advice which he had been unable to follow himself. With the reading of Hippolytus and the cracking of the outer shell of his cheerful, hard-working, no-nonsense self, introspection was running riot and ‘spiritualism’ – by which he clearly meant dabbling in affairs of the spirit rather than solely a preoccupation with the dead – had, by the summer of 1929, taken a firm grip on him. No wonder, then, that when he came to write up the experience in Surprised by Joy he should have been so insistent that his father’s last illness and death ‘does not really come into the story I am telling’. He was frightened that hostile readers of his theological work would be able to say that his religion could be ‘explained’ in terms of the Oedipus complex (or perhaps the Hippolytus complex); and that he was only able to find peace for his heart by coming to terms with a Heavenly Father of his own projection when he had seen the last of his earthly father in Belfast. So much did he dread that his own was a case of ‘redemption by parricide’ that he emphasized the unwillingness with which he accepted the divine call with language which is exaggerated and almost coarse. He was a ‘prodigal who is brought kicking, struggling, resentful and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape’.
He crossed the Irish channel on 12 August and reached Little Lea on the morning of the thirteenth. His father had been ‘under the weather’ since July, and Lewis was half-aware that he might be coming home for the last time. Once he set eyes on Albert, he knew that the old man was very sick indeed. His father rejoiced to see him, and noted that Jacks was ‘looking remarkably well and in great form’.
Jack fell quickly into the routine of looking out for the absurdities in his father’s speech to put into a P’dayta-Pie for Warnie; but he had no heart for it. He began to write about one such P’dayta-ism, and then crossed it out. The truth was, as he wrote to Warnie, that ‘P. is rather seriously ill.’ It was cancer of the bowel, though the doctors were slow or unwilling to diagnose it at first. Not long after Jack came home, Albert began to run high fevers. His heart was not strong either, and by the end of the month he was confined to his bed.
Jack stayed up to nurse him. Delighted to have his boy at home, Albert was in particularly cheerful form, in spite of his pain. When the doctors broke it to him that he would need an operation, his son noted that ‘he is taking it like a hero.’ All of a sudden, Jack saw that his father was a sort of hero – a maddening, eccentric hero but a man whose decency, courage and good humour were as unshakable as his sincere piety. The two men were enjoying a condition of harmony which had been unknown in all the previous years.
The house was full of memories; but even to call them memories was to imply that Jack had put them behind him; and he had not. ‘Every room is soaked with the bogeys of childhood … The awful rows, the awful returnings to school.’ He sat in the dining-room, able to enjoy a few biscuits and fruit rather than the ‘gargantuan midday meal which was hitherto compulsory’.
Every day he saw Arthur Greeves, who was still living next door, having studied art at the Slade School in London and returned to Belfast with no prospects. Arthur, who had followed so much of Jack’s inner journey, was the perfect companion du
ring those strange days. Much of the time, however, Jack was alone. When his father was tucked up for the night, the son would wander out into the garden and enjoy the cool air as a contrast to the fug of the sick-room. ‘My father and I are physical counterparts: and during these days more than ever I notice his resemblance to me … ’ he mused.21
At the beginning of September, the doctors recommended an operation, and Albert was moved into a nursing home. The operation revealed the extent of the cancer, but nevertheless Jack was told that his father might live for ‘a few more years’. Since he had teaching to prepare at Oxford for the following term, he said an unwilling farewell to his father and took the boat home. Four days later, on 25 September, Albert Lewis died. In the Lewis Papers, Warren remarked, ‘With his passing we lose him who may perhaps be described as the hero of our saga … His age was 66 years and 33 days.’
–TEN–
MYTHOPOEIA
1929–1931
‘I treated my own father abominably and no sin in my whole life now seems to be so serious,’ Lewis blurted out to a correspondent twenty-five years after A. J. Lewis’s demise.1 His remorse was perpetual and far-reaching, and it coloured the whole of his memory. Sadness for the way he had felt about the old man blended with a sense that his childhood was irrecoverably lost, and the knowledge that the very past
when it was in flight
Lived, like the present, in continual death.
Moreover the death of Albert only served to emphasize the emotional burden which he was now carrying: the increasing loneliness of the ageing Janie Moore, and the total isolation of his brother. Stationed as a soldier in Shanghai, and unable to get home until the following April, Warnie was in an agony of sorrow for the old days. ‘The P’daytabird is dead,’ his diary solemnly records.
All day I have been seeing pictures of him at his best; jumbled up in no chronological sequence – Saturday evening tram rides and visits to the Hippodrome with late supper afterwards in Malvern days, earlier days of ‘where do you want to go to’ in the study … the ‘Well, boys this is grand’ at the beginning of the holiday … his little drop of whiskey: his fund of wheezes.2
How far Warnie emulated at this stage of life his father’s fondness for a little drop of whiskey, and at what point he began his calamitous descent into alcoholism is not easy to determine. He was not actually dismissed from the service, though it was because of alcohol that he was asked to volunteer his own early resignation. One thing was certain. The death of his father made him homeless. ‘Worst of all, being pulled up by the roots – worse for me than for J[ack] for Leeborough has always been my base whereas his real home has been Hillsboro [Mrs Moore’s rented house in Headington, Oxford] for some years now. The thought that there will never be any going home is hard to bear.’
That the other person in Jack’s life, Mrs Moore, was also profoundly lonely is made clear by a generous, and at the same time comically self-revealing, letter which she wrote to Warnie on 29 October. She urged Warnie to treat Hillsboro as a home, and confessed:
I should have been very glad of your society this last year, Maureen has been at the Royal College of Music, and I have been much alone, only for the animal’s company I don’t know what I should have done and poor Mr. Papworth [a dog] has been so ill we had to telephone a vet up at 2 a.m. one morning it was a funny night, Jack and I in our dressing gowns in the kitchen trying to comfort Mr. Papworth. Jack and the vet (who turned out to be an Irishman too) drinking whiskey which they thought was brandy because I’d put it into a brandy bottle …
All this was kindly meant, and the suggestion that Warnie was welcome with Jack and Minto was some comfort. But the exiled soldier wanted more than a place to stay: he wanted, to a Peter Pan-ish degree, everything as it had been in his childhood home. In one of his lengthy letters to Jack from Shanghai, he suggested that they ‘yield to sentiment and construct the Little End Room in your sitting room at Magdalen’.3 In another letter he suggested constructing the ‘Little End Room’ in a spare bedroom at Headington, ‘a place where we can always meet on the common ground of the past and ipso facto a museum of the Leeborough which we want to preserve’.4 Furthermore, this 36-year-old officer was in desperation about the fate of their boyhood toys, locked up in a trunk in the attic at Leeborough. He found it ‘intolerable’ to think of the toys falling into the hands of other children – ‘The idea of a crowd of embryo “right wee fellas” getting hold of them and Bolshevising and applying to their own base purposes that well-ordered world in which we spent so many happy hours’.5
Jack felt the need to treat these outbursts by Warnie with firmness as well as with gentleness, not least because his brother was giving voice to feelings which he shared quite passionately himself. He rejected the idea of a Little End Room museum, not least because ‘a museum is preciously like a mausoleum’. He said it would be a mistake, ‘a mistake in sentiment; for it could only mean that we were embalming the corpse of something that isn’t really dead and needn’t die at all – an aesthetic mistake – because we don’t really want to have the taste of our schooldays established as a boundary for our whole lives’.6 To anyone who knew Lewis in the second half of his life, and remarked his preference for boys’ books such as R. M. Ballantyne or Captain Marryat over the so-called ‘moderns’, there can be no doubt that he was here addressing a warning not just to his brother but to himself.
Within a very few weeks of his father’s death, Lewis found himself obliged once more to take up the routines of an Oxford term: weekly tutorials, college meetings and lectures. Any thought of what was to happen to his family home in Belfast had to be shelved until a joint decision could be reached with his brother when he next came home on leave.
The most marked feature of Lewis’s own emotional and intellectual life as the autumn days grew shorter and the year 1929 drew to its close was the development of his friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien. It is only now, decades after they were first written down, that the reading public can begin to have any sense of the extent and range of Tolkien’s mythological writings. From his early years, he had been engaged in the creation of a whole world, comparable in scale with the world of Greek mythology, with a pantheon of gods, a hierarchy of elvish immortals, and a vast cycle of stories, some of them ‘forgotten’, or not yet formulated, in his imagination; some surviving in fragmentary form; some planned as long prose narratives; some conceived as great poems, longer than Beowulf. The sheer volume of all this, much of it composed before his fortieth birthday, bears testimony to a rare artistic self-confidence. One receives the strong impression that Tolkien would have continued to write his gnomish grammars, his elvish etymologies, his histories of mythological lost ages, his compilations of names, battles and magic tales, whether anyone wanted to read them or not. And indeed, the very extent to which they would be readable was called in question by their range and bulk. For how could a reader who knew nothing of the original matter – the origin of the Silmarils, the rise and fall of Numenor, the triumphs and ultimate ruin of Gondolin, etc. – find a way in? There exists no easy guide to the Tolkien mythology, and the existing materials, when published, have required the extensive annotation of Tolkien’s son.
Nevertheless, no writer, however self-sufficient, writes without a thought of an audience, and Tolkien was happy to discover anyone who could appreciate what he was up to. It was evident, from conversations with him at the Kolbitar, that Lewis was such a man, and in the autumn of 1929 Tolkien made bold to show him an unfinished version of his Lay of Leithian, the story of how the mortal Beren, returning from the wars, through the forests of Neldoreth, encounters the elfish maiden Luthien and falls in love with her. Thingol, Luthien’s father, is so enraged that a mortal should dare to woo his daughter that he says he will only give her hand to Beren if he will wrest one of the Silmarils, or enchanted jewels, from the iron crown of the dark lord Margoth. This impossible quest, which indirectly leads to the undoing of Thingol’s own elvish kingdom, is only possible bec
ause Luthien accompanies Beren on his journey. He manages to penetrate the fastness of the dark lord disguised in a wolfskin, while she is hidden in the garment of a bat; but it is her own enchantments, her beauty and her songs, which ultimately defeat the evil one.
Tolkien never finished the Lay of Leithian, though he worked at it on and off for seven years, composing at least two versions of the poem in more than four thousand lines of octosyllabic couplets. Though at times the verse is technically imperfect, it is full of passages of quite stunning beauty; and the overall conception must make it, though unfinished, one of the most remarkable poems written in English in the twentieth century.
It is worth describing it at such length so that readers who have not read Tolkien’s ‘minor’ works might develop some idea of Lewis’s importance as Tolkien’s ‘onlie begetter’ or ‘miglior fabbro’, for there can be very little doubt that it was Lewis’s friendship and encouragement which led Tolkien to write the works which made his name with the public; just as it was Tolkien’s friendship which released in Lewis wells of creativity which had remained (though he was so naturally fluent) mysteriously dry.