by A. N. Wilson
Once it became plain that Joy was not in danger of imminent death, Wamie’s whole position at The Kilns became delicate. ‘The gap between the Ancien Regime and the Restoration had lasted for less than four years,’ wrote the French historian, referring to the gap between the death of Minto and Jack’s marriage. ‘There are times when I get tired of the role of “family man”,’ he admitted to a friend. ‘Not that I don’t get on well with my sister-in-law; it is her detestable spoilt brat of an elder boy who is the fly in the ointment. But the other one is a decent little kid, so I suppose I shouldn’t grumble.’8
When the doctor’s report confirmed that Joy’s cancer had been arrested, Warnie announced his plans to leave Oxford and set up on his own in Ireland. ‘But Jack and Joy would not hear of this,’ and he was caught in the slightly awkward position of being the third party in a love-nest. Joy, as she frequently told Bill Gresham in her letters, set about helping her new brother-in-law not only with the index to his latest book, but also with his alcohol problem. ‘She’s the sort of woman who lives for others,’ as Screwtape observed all those years ago; ‘you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.’9 Warnie gave in to several bouts of steady drinking at this period, and in Ireland he found a refuge which would take him in after each one – the Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. The rest of his life (he died in 1973) was to be punctuated by his dependence on this routine. The marriage of his brother had not helped. He felt intensely alone. In March 1960, his diary was to record, ‘Joy away fetching Douglas and J spent the evening with me in the study. With the exception of the 15 minute walk back from St. Mary’s twice a month, this has been the only rime I have spent with him since the end of March 1957 – just three years ago.’
Jack’s other Oxford friends found the continual presence of Joy by his side irksome and baffling. When it was clear that she was going to recover, Jack conceived the naive idea that he could re-establish the Inklings as a sort of salon around her. He entirely failed to see how this looked to them. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, he had kept up the all-male Thursday evenings in a manner which was always convivial but frequently ‘awkward’ from a domestic point of view. He had expressed little or no interest in Tolkien’s family life or troubles, and insisted that his friend should come out alone to the gatherings. Dyson, Havard and Colin Hardie had all been expected likewise to abandon their wives in order to be with Lewis. But now, when the ardour of their friendship had in any case cooled, they were expected to flock around to The Kilns and enjoy the company of Lewis’s wife.
Even if this had been a prospect in itself inviting, Lewis could hardly have introduced the matter to his friends in a clumsier way. Tolkien, his closest friend from 1927 until about 1940, and still a figure of tremendous importance in Jack’s life, had only learnt about his marriage when he read about it in The Times. And there were other friends with whom Lewis was ‘funny’ about his wife. The Freuds, for instance, found that for the duration of Lewis’s marriage they were effectively dropped. When Jill Freud came to see Lewis in Oxford, he invited her not to The Kilns, but to Magdalen, where he still had lunching rights. He told her that he was married, and disclosed to her the strange phenomenon of his having taken on his wife’s pain, but he did not suggest that Joy might be introduced either to Jill or to Clement Freud.10
Those like the old Inklings who were forced to meet Joy did not enjoy it, and pretty soon made excuses to avoid meeting her again. She had shown enormous fortitude and courage in her illness, but while this may have been a reason for her loved ones to love her more, and for those who read about her afterwards to admire her, it did not have the effect of making her an interesting companion. In spite of the gallant suggestions made by her biographer, and by Lewis himself, that Joy had ‘wit’, a ‘sense of humour’, a ‘mind like a panther’, etc., none of her recorded utterances exactly bears out these claims. Warnie’s judgement was surely more accurate when he said ‘she is well-read, but no high-brow’. In a way which now seems touching, but which was at the time, to his friends, embarrassing and annoying, Lewis was so in love with his wife that he could not quite see how she might appear to anyone else; and anyway, as his friends had discovered in the days of Minto, qualities in women which they found repugnant were precisely the ones which he found alluring. He had rebutted with humourless anger any suggestion that it was a ‘cursed fate’ which had given him to the Moore. In exactly the same way, and for very similar reasons, he loved Joy. He once praised her for her masculine virtues. ‘She soon put a stop to that by asking how I’d like to be praised for my feminine ones. It was a good riposte, dear. Yet there was something of the Amazon, something of Penthesilea and Camilla. And you, as well as I, were glad that it should be there.’11
It was, in fact, an essential ingredient in what attracted Lewis to his wife in so profoundly erotic a manner. ‘For those few years’ they ‘feasted on love; every mode of it – solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers. No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied.’12 In his typically self-revealing way he advanced a generalization in The Four Loves about what can only be specific to certain cases; and of what case, other than his own, could he have been aware? The sexual act, he wrote, ‘can invite the man to an extreme, though short-lived masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme abjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, the fierceness, of some erotic play; “the lover’s pinch which hurts and is desired”.’13
To someone as wrapped up in his beloved as Lewis was, friendship of the kind he had enjoyed with Tolkien or Williams became, for the time being, impossible. This is surely the reason why most men in the West today do not, in Lewis’s sense of the word, have any friends at all. Like the great majority of married couples, Jack and Joy took to seeing ‘friends’ together – couples such as the Greens or the Farrers. No one for a moment would suggest that such foursomes do not constitute a convivial way of passing the time. Most married people, when they speak of their ‘friends’, mean precisely those with whom, as groups of four, six or eight, they pass their evenings or holidays. Lewis described the difference between such get-togethers and true friendship with his usual vigour when he said, ‘an endless prattling “Jolly” replaces the intercourse of minds’.14 He was writing, as so often, from experience.
On more than one occasion, when having a drink alone with Christopher Tolkien, Lewis would press the younger man for reasons why ‘Tollers’ had allowed their friendship to lapse. Lewis was hurt by it, but Christopher was too embarrassed to enter upon any explanation. Both the explanation and Lewis’s pain were embarrassing.15 Lewis, as he contemplated his old friendships and wrote their obituary in the chapter on ‘Friendship’ in The Four Loves, knew the reasons well enough, and in his cooler, more rational moments could spell them out with all his old merciless analytical power:
Her presence has thus destroyed the very thing she was brought to share. She can never really enter the circle because the circle ceases to be itself when she enters it – as the horizon ceases to be the horizon when you get there. By learning to drink and smoke and tell risqué stories, she has not, for this purpose, drawn an inch nearer to the men than her grandmother … She may be quite as clever as the men whose evening she has spoiled, or cleverer. But she is not really interested in the same things.
This was profoundly true of Joy vis-à-vis Dyson, the Tolkiens and others. She knew nothing of medieval literature, was ‘no high-brow’, and in disputation seemed quite unable to distinguish between vigour and rudeness, strength of expression and obscenity or profanity. No wonder the Lewises were thrown back on ‘an endless prattling “Jolly”’.
There was nevertheless not the smallest guarantee that when, as of old, Lewis was asked to conduct a speaking engagement, his wife would not come along too. An academic acquaintance of Lewis (female, agnostic) who was back in Oxford for a visi
t from another university went along, at about this period, to a very crowded meeting at which Lewis was billed to speak about Love and Faith-Healing. Though Lewis was the advertised speaker, his wife did most of the talking. ‘It left me’, wrote this witness, ‘with a vague feeling of disgust and uncertainty which I can still recapture. “There’s nowt so queer as folks.”’16
Joy was also said to have helped Lewis with his book Reflections on the Psalms, notably the scrappiest of all his books. ‘At one point,’ he writes in his introduction, ‘I had to explain how I differed on a certain matter both from Roman Catholics and from Fundamentalists: I hope I shall not for this forfeit the good will or prayers of either … But then I dare say I am a much more annoying person than I know. (Shall we, perhaps in Purgatory, see our own faces and hear our own voices as they really were?)’ The acute self-awareness which these sentences display is remarkable, and they reflect a new tone of voice.
The Four Loves, which he wrote as the 1950s drew to a close, is rather different. It is not so much a treatise as a piece of oblique autobiography, as the extracts from it which I have already quoted show. It contains some good Screwtape-style comic caricatures. One remembers in particular the maddening figure of Mrs Fidget.
She was always making things too; being in her own estimation (I’m no judge myself) an excellent amateur dressmaker and a great knitter. And of course, unless you were a heartless brute, you had to wear the things. (The Vicar tells me that, since her death, the contributions of that family alone to ‘sales of work’ outweigh all his other parishioners put together.) Mrs. Fidget, as she often said, would ‘work her fingers to the bone’ for her family. They couldn’t stop her. Nor could they – being decent people – quite sit still and watch her do it. They had to help. Indeed, they were always having to help – the Vicar says Mrs. Fidget is now at rest. Let us hope she is. What’s quite certain is that her family are … 17
Many of the book’s apophthegms are questionable – one thinks, for instance, of Lewis’s rather limited understanding of homosexuality: ‘All those hairy old toughs of centurions in Tacitus, clinging to one another and begging for last kisses when the Legion was broken up … all pansies? If you can believe that you can believe anything.’ It is remarkable that Lewis could have written in such simple-minded terms, particularly when one bears in mind that at least two of his closest friends (Coghill and Greeves) were homosexuals. Can he really have supposed that homosexual feeling was limited to ‘pansies’, or that it would invariably be the less the hairier or tougher a man was? The notion is as ridiculous as his apparent belief that friendship between the sexes is all but impossible, and his implication that ‘men’s talk’ and ‘women’s talk’ are two quite separate and immiscible dungs. ‘What were the women doing meanwhile? How should I know? I am a man and never spied on the mysteries of the Bona Dea.’18 This last is a risible fantasy which has done Lewis much damage in many of his readers’ eyes, written by a married man who had lived his entire grown-up life (with one short break) in the society of women and who numbered among the friends or acquaintances that he regularly saw or spoke to Dorothy Sayers, the poet Ruth Pitter, Rose Macaulay, the Anglo-Saxon scholar Dorothy Whitelock and Sister Penelope.
Interlaced with such strange ideas, there are sentences in The Four Loves of memorable wisdom and calm common sense. ‘Say your prayers in the garden early, ignoring steadfastly the dew, the birds and the flowers, and you will come away overwhelmed by its freshness and joy; go there in order to be overwhelmed, and after a certain age, nine times out of ten nothing will happen to you … Affection almost slinks or seeps through our lives. It lives with humble, un-dress, private tilings: soft slippers, old clothes, old jokes, the thump of a sleepy dog’s tail on the kitchen floor, the sound of a sewing machine, a golliwog left on the lawn.’ It is for paragraphs such as this that one remembers the book with gratitude. John Braine, the Yorkshire novelist and author of Room at the Top, used to keep The Four Loves by his bed in his later years. I suspect many people do. It stays in the mind, particularly for the times when, as in the final chapter on the love of God, Lewis writes with a new quietness, a new wistfulness.
If we cannot ‘practise the presence of God’, it is something to be able to practise the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like a man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch.19
This is a very different Lewis from the man who breezily wrapped up the whole mystery of the Incarnation by asking his wireless audiences to imagine how they would feel if they were reborn as slugs. He had already begun to glimpse both the incomprehensibility and the challenge of his faith. The Christian story is one of a mysterious love so strong that it led to self-abnegation on the part of the Godhead Himself; a story of one who was rich, for our sake becoming poor; a story of certainties and status abandoned, of sinlessness involved, totally, in the world of sin, to the point where it received the ultimate degradation and punishment for sin; of cosmic suffering; of darkness and abandonment by God; of Gethsemane and Golgotha. Lewis was to have the easy, theoretical – and almost frivolous, in the case of the slug parallel – certainties of his early days of faith tried to their limits.
From the end of 1957 until 1959, there was a period of happiness which in retrospect seemed as though it had only been sent to accentuate the times of torment which followed. As well as being so happy with Joy, Lewis was on top form in his academic work. Cambridge suited him in every way, and the lectures he gave there were superb. In 1960, he published one course of them under the title Studies in Words.
This is one of his most interesting books. It explores the history of certain English words – Nature, Sad, Wit, Free, Sense, and others – and reminds the modern reader how unsafe it is to take it for granted that he knows what these words ‘mean’ when they occur in an old book. ‘Sad’, for example, means ‘full’ in Old English; heavy, sated. It has gone through many semantic movements before acquiring its simple sense of ‘melancholy’.
From the very nature of metaphor, a word that means ‘heavy’ will be very likely to acquire the meaning ‘grievous’. A word that means ‘fed up’ will be very likely to acquire the meaning ‘displeased, ill-content’. A word which means ‘grave’ or even ‘steady-going’ will necessarily mean the opposite of ‘light’ or ‘sportive’. Thus we find sad used to mean ‘serious’, i.e. not joking. ‘Speak you this with a sad brow?’ are you in earnest? (Much Ado I.i.183) And what is serious will always be thought gloomy by some, and gloom may by litotes be called seriousness.20
Lewis did not understand, or attempt to understand, linguistic philosophy, or what the followers of Wittgenstein were to think of as ‘language games’. Nor was he a philologist. Tolkien once noted ‘CSL’s curious ability (remarkable in a great scholar with a wide range of languages) to misunderstand etymology’. But Lewis did indeed have a wide range; his examples in Studies in Wards are chosen from all over the library and, as so often in his writings, he makes us long to read the books he quotes – Beowulf or Jane Austen, Gower, Malory, Dryden, Launcelot Andrewes or Dickens. There is, in all his paragraphs, the stimulating sense of a lively intelligence at work, prepared to look up from his books and talk in an intelligible way to anyone who will listen. And there is such common sense in what he writes, as when he dissents from the ingenuities and false readings of I. A. Richards or William Empson; above all from the idea that language is always to be mixed up with the thing it attempts to signify. ‘Statements about crime are not criminal language; nor are statements about emotions necessarily emotional language … “It is not cancer after all”, “The Germans have surrendered”, “I love you” – may all be true statements about matter of fact. And of course it is the facts, not the language, that arouse the emotion.’
It is interesting that Lewis believed that the s
entence ‘I love you’ was not necessarily emotional language. But by the time he was reading the proofs of Studies in Words for the Cambridge University Press, he was more interested in the sentence ‘It is not cancer after all’ …
–NINETEEN–
MEN MUST ENDURE
1959–1960
In January 1959, Lewis wrote in the Atlantic Monthly,
I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thigh-bone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life: the nurses (who often know better) a few weeks. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photographs was saying ‘These bones are as solid as rock’. It’s miraculous.1
Lewis knew, intellectually, that all this was too good to be true; or, at any rate, that there could be no good reason for it to be true. To the question of why God might choose at certain moments to reverse the processes of nature he had devoted his mind in The Problem of Pain and Miracles; and although he had established a good case for arguing that – if you believe in the supernatural at all – it is irrational to disbelieve in the mere possibility of miracles, the experience of loving Joy had drawn him into the knowledge that where suffering was concerned there were no answers. But his heart could not resist the hope that a miracle had occurred, and he was ‘riding high’ to such an extent that the next stage was bound to be all the more shattering. So ‘high’ was he that he began to behave in a completely uncharacteristic way. For example, Roger and June Lancelyn Green, inveterate travellers and lovers of the Mediterranean, persuaded the Lewises to come with them the following spring on a ‘Wings Tour’ in Greece. Lewis was by now sixty-one years old. He had never set foot in an aeroplane and, apart from his time in the trenches, he had never been abroad. For most of his life, he would have regarded foreign travel as an unpardonable extravagance. Even the holidays he took in Ireland once a year were rigidly budgeted for and sometimes cancelled. He would also, one suspects, have shared Warnie’s view that foreign travel ‘spoiled’ reading; and that if one had read Theocritus, Homer or Pindar it would actually spoil things to have one’s vision of their Greece transformed by a Wings Tour Greece – the white concrete tavernas, the songs of Greek waiters, the fellow tourists, not to mention something he had always particularly detested, the heat. Yet here he was, signing up for a holiday with his wife like any other twentieth-century human being. What was happening to the ‘dinosaur’ who had so proudly laid out his credentials upon arrival in Cambridge?