by A. N. Wilson
J. R. R. Tolkien, to whom Lewis read aloud The Pilgrim’s Regress, liked the book. Thirty years later, however, Tolkien saw that there was more in the word ‘regress’ than had immediately met his ear. He saw that Lewis
would not re-enter Christianity by a new door but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up again or reawaken the prejudices so sedulously planted in childhood and boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland Protestant – though with a difference, certainly: he was no longer a resident; he was learned; he had the wonderful gifts both of imagination and a clear and analytical mind; and above all his faith came of Grace to which he responded heroically, in patience and self-sacrifice – when he was aware of himself.6
Tolkien’s contention was that something he called ‘the ulsterior motive’ – the bogey of Lewis’s Ulster background – lurked beneath the surface of his imagination, and rose when he was off his guard to make him brutal in manners, crude or illogical in thought. Anyone who has studied Lewis’s work must know what Tolkien meant, though the ‘ulsterior motive’ is much more apparent in Lewis’s reported speech (particularly in speech lubricated by the wine of High Table or the beer of Oxfordshire pubs) than on the printed page. But Tolkien’s censure, written from the standpoint of one who had himself hardened in a sentimental devotion to the religion of his boyhood, must not be accepted without qualifications.
With his conscious self, Lewis had a very distinct loathing of Ulster Protestantism. When he attended St Mark’s, Dundela, for the first time after his conversion, he was repelled by the sense that ‘these good Produsdands’ went there to express party solidarity rather than religious feeling; and he found his Irish relations almost universally repulsive. He and Warnie, for example, had decided that they would erect a memorial window to their parents in St Mark’s, but it was a decision they quickly came to regret when the Lewis, Hamilton and Ewart cousins all weighed in with suggestions of what should go into the window. The incumbent of St Mark’s, the Rev. Claude Lionel Chavasse, suggested that the window might contain a view of St Mark’s itself in the background. Lewis immediately guessed that this suggestion came not from Chavasse but from his Aunt Lily, and in the irrational way that such family meddling irritates, this prompted an extraordinary flow of anger. He described the case to Warnie:
It just occurs to me as I write that Chavasse in this matter is probably the unwilling mouthpiece of the Select Vestry: I daresay even that monstrous regiment of women, incarnated in Lily Ewart, is really at the bottom of it. Zounds! – I’d like a few minutes at the bottom of her! No ‘thought inform’ would there ‘stain my cheek’: a firm hand rather would stain both hers.7
He disliked the ethos of Irish Protestantism and he did not believe in its doctrines. If the mark of a reborn evangelical is a devotion to the Epistles of St Paul and in particular to the doctrine of Justification by Faith, then there can have been few Christian converts less evangelical than Lewis. When he has been a Christian for three years, we find him, in the pages of his brother’s diary, reading The Epistle to the Romans, the greatest exposition in Scripture of the themes of Original Sin, Grace and Justification by Faith. ‘Jack’, we discover, ‘has been reading this epistle with a commentary but could get no help from it.’8
In later years, when Lewis showed Mere Christianity to four clergymen, of four different denominations, for their criticisms, he received hostile comments from two of the four. One of these two, inevitably, was his old pupil and sparring partner Alan Griffiths (by then a Roman Catholic monk, Dom Bede Griffiths), who claimed that Lewis undervalued the doctrine of the Atonement. Perhaps more fundamental than this was the criticism he received from a Methodist minister that the book does not really mention, let alone do justice to, the central Christian doctrine of Justification by Faith.
Lewis came to the faith by means of what one could loosely term Neo-Platonism. It was the sense of another world which drew him; the sense he got from MacDonald (a convert to Broad Church Anglicanism from Congregationalism) of Heaven being penetrable through dreams and the subconscious and the exercise of the imagination. It was the conviction of Tolkien (a Roman Catholic) that truth is best discerned through myth which finally tipped the balance. In all this period he was influenced by Barfield (a disciple of Rudolph Steiner) and by rereading Plato himself, as well as by Neo-Platonist writers such as Dean Inge (Broad Church). It is therefore a mistake to make too much of ‘the ulsterior motive’.
In actual devotional practice, Lewis was greatly guided by reading the Imitatio Christi of Thomas à Kempis. The hallmarks of Thomas à Kempis’s approach to the religious life are a rigorous inner self-discipline and a conformity, for reasons of humility, to the existing forms of Christianity as met from day to day wherever you happen to be. As to the outward forms of religion, Lewis decided from the moment that he became a Christian that he should attend his college chapel on weekday mornings and his parish church on Sundays. As it happened, the ritual of Magdalen chapel was ‘Low Church’ and that of the Headington Quarry church was ‘High’. With his background in Ulster, where he had seen the blasphemous absurdity of Christians hating one another on the grounds of historical or ritual difference, he was always rigorously ‘non-party’ in his Anglicanism. His non-ritualism was still, in the early 1930s, perfectly normal and there were many Anglicans who would have shared it, though perhaps not all would have been quite so dogged about it as he. On Palm Sunday, 1934, for example, Lewis and his brother attended the liturgy at the parish church in Headington Quarry. The vicar ‘came down to the steps at the top of the nave, accompanied by a server with a basket of palms and we all went up and got one except J[ack].’9 This might be thought to be the ulsterior motive surfacing; but if so, it has to be balanced by Lewis’s unconquerable distaste for hymns (not a markedly Protestant trait). At the Quarry church, if he attended a choral service, it was his invariable custom to leave during the singing of the last hymn.10 He had, in fact, an almost Tridentine attitude to the liturgy. In spite of his distaste for ‘frills’, he saw church-going as something one did out of obedience; something which shaped the life of prayer and reminded each individual that he or she was a ‘member incorporate in the blessed company of all faithful people’; but not something which needed to be added to, still less enjoyed as a hobby.
Warnie, incidentally, was less brave than Jack, and dutifully went up to fetch his palm, in an agony of embarrassment. ‘I think that there is a real risk that an imaginative child may get the impression that a bit of palm is in some way a magical charm,’ he considered. To be on the safe side, he burnt his when he got home, presumably unaware that this was, liturgically, the ‘correct’ and Catholic thing to do, though some forty-six weeks too early.
By now, the household of The Kilns had taken on the shape which it was to maintain until well after the Second World War. Warnie had retired from the Army at the earliest possible opportunity, in December 1932, and moved in with Jack and Minto as a permanent fixture. He was thirty-seven years old. The question of what he was to do with himself for the rest of his life was never properly resolved in his mind or anyone else’s, which perhaps accounts for his periodic assaults on the whiskey bottle – what Minto called ‘Warnie’s benders’. Being Irish herself, and the sister of a man who had gone mad with syphilis, she was rather more tolerant of Warnie’s foibles than he was of hers.
Among the innumerable items which they brought away from Little Lea – a lumpish wardrobe to which Jack had a sentimental attachment, for instance – there were countless letters, diaries and family papers stretching back to the lifetime of their Lewis and Hamilton grandparents. Warnie was a natural historian, and he set himself the task of putting all these documents into chronological order. The real interest of the past, he wrote, ‘lies in the answer to the question, How did the ordinary undistinguished man live? … and it is with a view to providing posterity with an addition to such all too scanty materials that the papers … have been embodied
in permanent form.’11 Undergraduate pupils of Jack’s throughout the middle years of the 1930s got used to passing through the outer drawing-room of his rooms at Magdalen where sat the mysterious figure of Captain Lewis, typing with two fingers on an ancient black portable. The finished result, eleven bound volumes of single-spaced pages, is a testimony to Warnie’s extraordinary patience, as well as to his seemingly inexhaustible appetite for contemplating his own immediate past. Every note, every school report, every passing wheeze of the P’daytabird is here; and since, by a strange series of chances, the Lewis Papers now reside in an air-conditioned cavern in the suburbs of Chicago, we may suppose that they will survive for ever, perhaps long after Oxford and Ulster have been lost to sight.
Jack never seems to have regarded the proximity of his brother, even while doing his teaching, as a burden; if anything, it was the reverse. But the possibilities of domestic tension were increased by Warnie’s presence a hundredfold. Both Warnie and Minto were jealous of anyone who claimed Jack’s love; this meant that they were bound to be jealous of one another, since for both of them Jack was the most important person in the universe.
Shortly after moving into The Kilns, Minto had engaged a gardener to help her with the eight acres of ground. His name was Fred Paxford, and he lived in a small wooden bungalow on the other side of the brick kilns. Paxford was a ‘character’, given to looking on the black side of every passing scene, and to lugubrious murmurings of ‘Abide with Me’ and other hymns while he toiled. His pessimistic character was fairly faithfully reproduced in Puddleglum, the Marshwiggle in The Silver Chair. In spite of Paxford’s strong left-wing views, Minto idolized him and allowed him to occupy the same sort of position in her household as John Brown had occupied at the court of Queen Victoria. He was consulted as an oracle on all occasions, however inappropriate, and this was something which Warnie found insufferably annoying. His diaries chronicle each phase of irritation with novelistic detail.
I quite suddenly got very bored with M’s conversation tonight. She has lately developed a tiresome habit of becoming a mere compendium of Paxford’s views; every conceivable topic is met with a reply beginning ‘Paxford says’. I am resigned to being addressed by the new name of Pax-Warnie, but if she is to become a mere conduit of the Paxford philosophy it will be a very great bore. Further, it makes me angry with myself to find that the perfectly natural and utterly unfair result is that I begin to dislike Paxford, no exercise of the will convincing me that it is not the unfortunate P. who is boring me with his views on everything under the sun.
A magnificent example of the ‘Paxford says’ routine is provided when Maureen and Minto have been into Oxford to get two wireless sets on approval. The scene is the kitchen at The Kilns and both sets are plugged in.
MAUREEN: Well the A set certainly has the better tone.
MINTO: Oh no, dear, Paxford says the B set has a lovely tone; he says the A set is tinny.
MAUREEN: Well, it blurs the sound: you can’t hear the ‘Underneath’ of any music.
MINTO: Paxford and I were saying it was so clear.
MAUREEN: Then it’s easier to find stations on the A set.
MINTO: Paxford says the B set is easier; Paxford says he got forty stations on it: he made it work beautifully.
MAUREEN (trying the B set which emits a series of siren-like whoops and then a muffled jazz band): It doesn’t seem particularly easy to get ANY station on the B.
MINTO: Ask Paxford, dear: he’ll show you how to work it in the morning.
MYSELF (Internally): Bugger Paxford. (Aloud): Well, goodnight, I’m off to bed.
MINTO: Goodnight Pax-Warnie. Paxford says—(I close the door and go to bed).12
Jack avoided being a witness to these scenes much of the time by residing in college. For half the year, he would sleep at The Kilns. But during the three eight-week terms his routine was to sleep in college, at least for the days in the middle of the week. If Maureen was at home, she would drive into Oxford to fetch him home for lunch. Sometimes Paxford fulfilled this office. And if neither of them was at home Lewis would return to The Kilns by bus; so Minto was visited each day. There was, indeed, never a day, except when he was away on short holidays, during which he did not spend some time in her company, from the time of their first association in 1919 until her death in 1951. This has been represented as some kind of martyrdom on Lewis’s part; and doubtless, like any long-term relationship, it called for reserves of patience and good humour on both sides. But it is absurd to suppose that Lewis had nothing to gain from Minto’s company, or that all their time was spent discussing domestic trivia (much as she and Lewis both enjoyed such discussions). A recent pen has asserted that Mrs Moore was never seen with a book in her hands. It is true that she was not academic; this was part of her charm for Lewis. But even the most rudimentary reading of his many surviving letters will reveal passages which speak of the pleasures of reading with or to Mrs Moore. In 1936, for example, we find them reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando together; and in 1943, Lewis wrote to a friend that Minto was reading Jane Eyre.
She, for her part, accepted the fact that he was gregarious and, like the great majority of men in those days, tended to congregate with members of his own sex. Our social mores have changed so much that it is easy to single out as personal characteristics those which were actually held in common by nearly everyone. Lewis, for instance, is frequently spoken of as a man who enjoyed male coteries, as though, in the 1930s, the regiments, the London clubs, the Oxford and Cambridge colleges and the City companies were all overflowing with ‘mixed’ company. This simply was not so, and the fact that Lewis spent evenings in the company of male friends was not what distinguished him.
Even to speak of those by-now famous evenings as a coterie is to imply that they were both more formal and more enclosed than was the case. For example, one day in 1934 or 1935, Lewis had influenza. In those days, if you were ill in England, the doctor visited you, rather than expecting you to stagger to the surgery. Minto summoned the man who had recently taken over the Headington practice from the household’s former practitioner, Dr Wood. The doctor who appeared was R. E. Havard, and after five minutes of talk about influenza (Lewis had rather a fondness for discussing symptoms man to man), they fell to some ethical or philosophical talk. Lewis, it struck Havard, a recent convert to Roman Catholicism and a devotee of Thomas Aquinas, took a remarkably idealistic, Berkeleyan view of things.
On the strength of this exchange, Lewis realized that Havard would be a man who would enjoy meeting some of the people who had taken to dropping into his rooms at Magdalen on Thursday evenings. Not long afterwards, therefore, Havard was invited to call at Magdalen. Warnie was there to welcome him and to dispense drinks. Others present included Lord David Cecil, who had lately come back to Oxford to teach English Literature at New College, and Adam Fox, the college chaplain. Dyson and Tolkien were also there. Lewis was the presiding genius; the meeting took place in his rooms and it was he who chose the moment to ask if anyone present had any work in progress which they wanted to read aloud. It was in this way that Havard first came to hear many of Tolkien’s tales, David Cecil’s Two Quiet Lives, and reflections on Dante by Colin Hardie (who taught Classics at Magdalen and was also a regular member of the circle), as well as many of Lewis’s own works. This was no ordinary gathering of men. The level of wit and comment, sometimes abusive, sometimes adulatory, about what was read was consistently high. How many ‘literary’ men, happily ensconced in a coterie, would ask along their doctors? Can we imagine a GP being made to feel welcome in the Bloomsbury set? But one also sees in the adoption of Havard the vivid contrast which existed between the clubbable Lewis liked by his friends and the figure he presented on the domestic scene. It is easy to get the impression that he was the only one to suffer in this area, constantly put upon by Mrs Moore or bored by her daughter. Seen from the women’s angle, things could sometimes appear differently.
No sooner had Havard become a friend than Lewi
s casually asked one day why Minto and Maureen did not entertain the doctor’s family; have his wife to tea and allow his children to swim in the quarry pond. Minto was always happy to entertain young people, and the invitation was issued. The Havards arrived at The Kilns, Maureen played tennis with them, swam with them and provided them with the sandwiches and cakes which she and her mother had been preparing all day. They liked the Havards, and were pleased to have met them. Not so Jack, who appeared to have forgotten that it was his idea to invite them in the first place. ‘Really, Maureen,’ he bellowed at her, ‘the friends you insist on inviting round become uglier and uglier. I never saw such an ugly family as the Havards.’