C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  It was in October 1959 that he accompanied Joy to the Churchill Hospital for her final cancer check-up. Having approached all previous check-ups with dread, they were not worried about this one. ‘Her health seemed so complete.’2

  But on this occasion the X-rays revealed that Joy had been enjoying a ‘remission’ and that her cancer was not cured at all. At first the doctors thought it possible that she would have ‘a few years’ life still’ but, as Lewis knew, ‘We are in retreat. The tide has turned.’3

  Throughout the winter of 1959-60, Joy struggled bravely against her illness and the Lewises tried to keep life going as normally as they could. Jack went to and fro between Oxford and Cambridge, nearly always accompanied by her. The boys continued to go to school. David Gresham was now nearly sixteen; Douglas was fourteen.

  By March 1960, it was very doubtful whether she would be well enough to travel to Greece on the planned holiday with the Greens; but, in spite of her doctors’ warning not to go, what did Joy have to lose? ‘I’d rather go out with a bang than a whimper,’ she wrote to Bill Gresham, ‘particularly on the steps of the Parthenon.’4 So, although she recognized that ‘I’ve got enough cancers now to form a Trades Union of the darned things,’5 she and Jack set off in April on their Wings Tour for twelve days.

  There could have been no more perfect travelling companions than the Greens. Roger knew Greece very well, and loved it. June, as well as being a passionate philhellene, is a person of a tremendous bubbly kindness and conversational vitality. She was not at all the insensitively breezy kind, but it was not possible, even in the Lewises’ wretched condition, to be miserable in her company for long. They drank a lot, which helped to deaden the pain which Joy was evidently suffering, and they amused her, while she threw bread at waiters and swigged her ouzo, by making up harmless doggerel.6 Jack was amazed by how much he liked it all. ‘Joy performed prodigies, climbing to the top of the Acropolis and getting as far as the lion gate of Mycenae … She was absolutely enraptured by what she saw … Attica is hauntingly beautiful and Rhodes is an earthly paradise.’ Three years later, Lewis remembered, ‘Joy knew she was dying. I knew she was dying, and she knew I knew she was dying – but when we heard the shepherds playing their flutes in the hills it seemed to make no difference.’7

  They returned home in ‘a nunc dimittis frame of mind’. Joy was completely exhausted by the trip, and suffered several weeks of acute pain and frequent nausea. On 20 May she was taken into the Acland Nursing Home where she had her right breast removed. But still she fought for life; by the beginning of the next month, she was back at The Kilns. Warnie was pushing her about in a wheelchair. She even managed to buy him a dozen handkerchiefs for his sixty-fifth birthday on 16 June. She began to make arrangements for Bill Gresham’s first visit to England, planned for August. But even in the midst of these preparations, she was once more stricken by appalling pain and taken into the Acland. David and Douglas were brought home from their boarding school for the death-bed scene. ‘Finish me off quick,’ she said to the doctor, ‘I won’t have another operation.’8 Warnie decided that this was the last he would ever see of her. But he was wrong. ‘Once again Joy has made fools of the doctors and nurses, having returned to us on Monday 2 7th June looking, and saying, that she feels better than she has done for a long time past.’ With anxiety momentarily removed from his mind, Warnie settled down to read Little Lord Fauntleroy, with tremendous admiration for ‘Mrs. Burnett’s power of drawing a perfectly good child who is neither a prig nor a bore’.9 On 3 July, Joy felt well enough to go over to a favourite hotel, Studley Priory, to have dinner with Jack and Warnie. The next day she had a pleasant drive with a friend in the Cotswolds. On 12 July Warnie made tea – his usual late-night ritual, took it in to Jack and Joy, and went off to bed. When he left them they sounded as though they were ‘reading a play together’. Jack remembered ‘how long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly we talked together that last night!’

  In all her illness so far, she had never cried out. But at 6.15 a.m. Warnie was woken by the sound of Joy screaming. The doctor had come by about seven and administered dope; but she had been drugged so much in the previous months that although the painkillers brought some relief, they did not make her lose consciousness. Incredibly, there was a difficulty about finding her a hospital bed, and Jack had to spend the whole morning ringing round, eventually persuading Joy’s surgeon, Till, to give her a private bed at the Radcliffe Infirmary. Jack sat with her throughout the afternoon and evening in the ward. She asked him to give her fur coat to Katharine Farrer, and expressed the wish to be cremated. Very near the end, he said to her, ‘If you can – if it is allowed – come to me when I too am on my death bed.’ ‘Allowed!’ she said. ‘Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.’10 Austin Farrer came in to hear her confession and see her out of the world. She asked him to take her funeral service. ‘Don’t get me a posh coffin,’ she asked. ‘Posh coffins are all rot.’ Then she said to him, ‘I am at peace with God.’

  At about twenty to two that night, Warnie heard Jack returning to the house. ‘What news?’ he asked, coming out into the hall. ‘She died about twenty minutes ago,’ said Jack. They announced her death in the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper which Warnie habitually read, but neglected to put it in The Times. In consequence, even close friends like Roger and June Lancelyn Green were unaware that Joy had died. Jack was horrified by how few people attended her funeral, which took place on 18 July. Just two taxis carried the mourners the short distance from The Kilns to the Oxford Crematorium. Jack, Warnie and the boys went in the first. Mollie and Len Miller, the cleaning lady and handyman at The Kilns, followed in the second car with the nurse (Hibbie) and the Master of Magdalene, Cambridge. Quite by chance, the two cars met up with the hearse at the roundabout. It was a sunny, blustery day, with big white clouds. Only Katharine Farrer was present in the crematorium chapel as they trooped in behind the coffin. Austin Farrer read the Prayer Book service, his voice frequently and uncharacteristically choked with emotion. There was no music. Sun shone through the windows of the bleak little chapel as the coffin was withdrawn and curtains, pulled invisibly, hid it for ever.11

  –TWENTY–

  LAST YEARS

  1960–1963

  Lewis’s natural reaction to any experience was to write it up, or down. As he had discovered, with a mixture of joyful shock and embarrassment (‘What an ass I have been’), this often led to a curious effect of unreality, as in the case of his over-eager desire to defend religious positions which he had really only fallen in love with from the outside, before learning what it was like to live them. A Grief Observed, as he came to call the jottings which he made from almost the moment Joy died, has an almost novelistic quality from its brilliant first sentence – ‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.’ But the fragmentary nature of the book, its lack of any cohesion, is a new development in Lewis. People speak of being shattered by bereavement. A Grief Observed, in its shooting stabs of pain, its yelps of despair, its tears, its emotional zig-zagging, bears testimony to just such a shattering. There can be no doubt that it was written from the heart. In its very scrappiness, it is far truer than the apparently cohesive Surprised by Joy of five years earlier.

  He confronts, in the experience of grief, some of the most fundamental questions a man can ever ask. He does so, not without flinching, for one of the endlessly appealing things about the book is its admission of fear, its willingness to lay hurt bare, but without fudging. In marriage he recognized that he had been ‘forced out of [his] shell’. Was he now doomed to crawl back, or to be sucked back into it? One of the reasons for keeping the notebooks was to keep alive that newborn self that Joy had nursed into being, a tender and more vulnerable self. But how could he do so, without either indulging in morbid displays of emotion or making Joy into a sanctified figure which she was not? He recognized quite truthfully that she was ‘rather a battle-axe’.1 It had been more than he had ever dar
ed to admit about Minto (or about his own mother?).

  But the truth-telling was excruciatingly painful. The boys, as he realized, found him embarrassing. He saw in their faces the same feelings as he and Warnie had had about the P’daytabird in the weeks after his own mother died. He seemed, according to Douglas Gresham, ‘incapable of understanding that if he kept on talking about my mother, I was going to burst into tears – what embarrassed me was that fear.’2 Presumably one of the things which makes A Grief Observed such a consoling and helpful book to thousands of bereaved people is that Lewis knew by instinct what is now a commonplace of bereavement counselling, that grief must be expressed and lived through. His whole life had been warped by his failure to express grief for his mother. Ever since that disastrous day in August 1908, he had been buttoned up. Perhaps even the release caused by loving Joy was not enough to melt him; it was in losing her that the essential work of healing mysteriously began. He had to weep. Sometimes, if a person mentioned Joy in his presence, he would burst into uncontrollable tears.3 Only once, even so, could he bring himself to comfort the boys physically. One day when Douglas was crying, Lewis came and hugged him and they stood there for some moments crying together. Thereafter they found it easier to talk to each other. Such a scene – Jack Lewis, in tears, holding in his arms a weeping adolescent boy – would have been quite unthinkable to those close friends with whom, over thirty or forty years, he had not been able to share even the simplest intimacies.

  Such a tremendous emotional shake-up was bound to have an enormous effect on his relationship with God. In Surprised by Joy, he had been so terrified of anyone placing a Freudian interpretation on the fact that his ability to believe in God only came upon him with the death of his father that he had deliberately played down his father’s part in the story, making the P’daytabird into a purely comic character and reducing his important last illness to a single short paragraph. Now, beaten down into a position of absolute honesty, he faced a much more terrible thought than the facile idea that God was really a projection of his father. What, instead, if the reactions of irritation and disgust which he had foisted on the unfortunate Albert Lewis were really emotions more properly reserved for his Heavenly Father? Total unbelief flickered across his consciousness – ‘Go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.’4 But his imagination could not absorb the idea of no-God. Instead, with Promedtean courage, he faced a more dreadful alternative. ‘Fate (or whatever it is) delights to produce a great capacity and then frustrate it. Beethoven went deaf. By our standards a mean joke; the monkey trick of a spiteful imbecile.’5 If God is all-powerful, and if he made the world in which we suffer, what other alternative can there be? In his Beethoven example, the crucial phrase is by our standards. It reflects the sort of attitude which produced Thomas Hardy’s magnificently haunting poem, ‘God’s Education’. But Hardy, like most of those in modern literature who have railed against Providence, did not really believe in God. Lewis did, which is what makes his cries of anguish against ‘the Cosmic Sadist’ so much more devastating. Outside the Psalms and the Book of Job, there is not a book quite like A Grief Observed, a book by a man who still believes in God but cannot find evidence for His goodness. Like the Psalmist, and like Job, Lewis lets himself be tossed about from mood to mood. He moves on from the Cosmic Sadist idea. He realizes that if his faith has been knocked to pieces like a house of cards, then no such hypothesis is necessary.

  From this point of blackness, he moves on again. Some days, he feels that the grief is lightening and he fears its going; he is tempted morbidly to hug it. Sometimes he thinks life is getting back to normal and he is suddenly hit by the full force of his grief all over again. Gradually, however, he starts to feel that the whole process has been so painful because it has involved the smashing of all his illusions; that religion, if true, must be the ultimate truth, and therefore something which could never be contained in the pat phrases and slick analogies of his earlier self.

  My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence? … All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.

  This understanding makes him realize how little either of Joy, or of the dead, or of God, he has hitherto understood.

  Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask – half our great theological and metaphysical problems – are like that.

  No, it was not Wittgenstein who wrote that. It was C. S. Lewis. His confrontation, his war, with the Unknown God produced writings which were far more searching, far more intelligent, far more deeply religious, than any of those papers which he read aloud to amused undergraduate audiences or to wireless listeners during the Second World War. This was the real thing.

  Having finished his essay, Lewis sent it to his agents, Curtis Brown, who submitted it anonymously to Faber & Faber. The author of the typescript was N. W. Clark. T. S. Eliot, Managing Director of Faber & Faber, found the short typescript distasteful enough to be worth a second reading. No one can read the book without being haunted by it. Like everything Lewis ever published, it is supremely readable, and the experiences it describes are of such pain and such universality that one cannot fail to turn the pages. But the reader’s report was unfavourable. Several people were consulted and no one seemed sure that N. W. Clark, whoever he was, should be allowed to burden the world with his unhappiness. It so happened that T. S. Eliot then asked Charles Monteith, a younger director of the firm and a Fellow of All Souls, to read the typescript and give his opinion. Monteith, who had not only been a pupil of Lewis’s, but was also a fellow Ulsterman, instantly recognized the handwritten corrections which appeared at several points in the typescript. Once he had done so, everything else fell into place. He knew that Lewis had lately lost his wife, and also that he published poems in Punch under the pseudonymous initials N.W. for Nat Whilk (Old English for ‘I know not who’). He told Eliot of his discovery and the decision was made to publish.6

  Strangely enough the book did not do very well. Faber & Faber sent it to Donald Coggan, the Archbishop of York, for his comments, preserving the author’s anonymity. Coggan was forthright in condemning what he thought of as its mawkish and unmanly tone. Trevor Huddleston, the campaigner for black rights in South Africa and later Archbishop of Mauritius, however, remarked, ‘I began to read it at once and quite literally could not put it down … I believe that it would be of the greatest help to many people in bereavement, not least because it refuses to compromise or to sentimentalise over the issue of death, yet it remains a profoundly religious and theological document.’7 Huddleston’s words were to be proved true, but not at once. Faber & Faber did not sell more than twelve or thirteen hundred copies until, after Lewis’s death, Owen Barfield as the literary executor of the estate authorized them to publish it under Lewis’s name. Then it became an instant bestseller and has continued to sell very well ever since. For the burning truths it contains, as well as for the thousands of people it has ‘helped’, one could almost say that (in the unlikely event of all Lewis’s works save one being destroyed and wiped from the face of the earth) one would choose A Grief Observed above all his other books.

  There is a certain irony in the fact that it was published by Eliot. The two men had never felt drawn to each other. From an early stage Lewis had made rather a ‘thing’ of being unable to see merit in Eliot’s
poetry, and their disagreement about Milton could not have been more absolute. In other ways, it could be said that there were areas of similarity in these two men temperamentally so very different. Both came to England as strangers; both found their way by a circuitous spiritual path to lives patterned by the restraints of the Anglican confessional and the consolations of the Anglican altar. Both were men with two women in their lives, separated by a long gap of pious, not particularly happy celibacy; both had found soul mates in their second marriages to much younger women.

  Charles Williams had made an attempt long since to bring the two men together, at the Mitre Hotel in Oxford in 1945. It had been a somewhat frosty occasion, with Eliot remarking, ‘Mr Lewis, you are a much older man than you appear in photographs,’ before going on to pay him a back-handed compliment – ‘I consider your Preface to “Paradise Lost” your best book.’ Read Eliot’s essays on Milton, and think about it.