C. S. Lewis

by A. N. Wilson

  The Farrers were on hand, but they could not undertake the work of looking after Lewis in his decrepitude. He now needed a night nurse and a day nurse; and the flood of correspondence still continued. He needed Warnie, but Warnie ‘doesn’t even write and is, I suppose, drinking himself to death’. Lewis had never been so alone in his life. He felt compelled, when sanity had been restored to him, to write to Magdalene resigning his fellowship. Oxford – as always in the Long Vacations – was deserted. No friends seemed to be there for him. As so often in life, he conducted himself on the ‘ram caught in a thicket’ principle.

  A young American from the University of Kentucky called Walter Hooper had recently arrived in Oxford to attend a summer school and for the purpose of getting to know Lewis. He had visited The Kilns, and Lewis had taken him out to pubs to meet his friends on several occasions. Since Hooper wished to write some sort of dissertation on Lewis, and regarded him as ‘the Master’, what more suitable figure could Lewis find to help him through the summer? He impulsively asked Hooper to come and work at The Kilns as his secretary, and a Scotsman called Alec Ross was hired as the night nurse. Thus passed the month of August and some of September. Then Hooper went back to the United States, intending to return as Lewis’s full-time secretary after Christmas.

  The consequence of Lewis’s Lazarus-like ‘reprieve’ was that he was able to spend the last months of his life, as he had spent so many years before, in the company of Warnie. Jack had reached the point of despairing, and was writing to Greeves in tones of great desolation – ‘But oh Arthur, never to see you again!’ – when the prodigal returned. Warnie was like a dog who had just eaten the Sunday roast off the dinner table. But he need not have worried. There were no recriminations. For two quietly happy months, the brothers lived together as they had always dreamed of doing. Warnie coped with the letters. Jack sat and read. In a strange sort of way, as he remarked to one correspondent, there was something positively comforting about being out of things, and no longer obliged to keep up with the latest developments in scholarship; ‘I have re-read the Iliad instead.’ Though infinitely enfeebled, he was being given two months of Bookham days, with vast leisure in which to read and no responsibility for domestic chores. Only they were Bookham days with a difference, for they had none of the loneliness which characterized Lewis’s time with Kirkpatrick. The Little End Room had been re-established after all. He and Warnie were together. Not that everything which Warnie read to him could give pleasure. That terrible habit of reading the newspapers brought some severe shocks. On 16 November 1963 Jack wrote to a lady in Darien, Connecticut:

  My brother tells me gloomily that it is an absolute certainty that we shall have a Labour Government within a few months, with all the regimentation, austerity and meddling which they so enjoy. Perhaps it will not be so bad this time for Sir Stafford Cripps, the late nursery governess of England, is dead. But if they get in with a big majority, it will take ten years to break it down – which means that both of us have in all probability seen our last Conservative government.20

  Warnie’s newspaper did not err, but Jack was to be spared what he so much dreaded; spared, too, the resurrection of the troubles in his native Ulster. For a week or more, he remained at The Kilns, propped up in the very room where Joy had spent so many heroic hours of suffering. Paxford, repeatedly singing ‘Abide with Me’ sotto voce, did some cooking. It was all excellent; houses have memories and atmospheres. As he sat mere with a book on his lap, Lewis could not fail to remember the scenes of a past existence: Paxford egging Minto on to buy the dud wireless set; Minto, still in the days of her vigour, feeding the fowls, exercising the dogs, amusing the evacuee children; shy, kind June Flewett coming up behind him in the study and kissing him on the back of his head; or much earlier, in the late 1920s, Bruce MacFarlane and another Fellow of Magdalen calling at the house unannounced. Lewis had hovered, and not gone to the door. Maureen had answered it. He had watched the Fellows walk away, clearly astonished to discover that Jack the archetypal bachelor was sharing his house with two women. Whatever the real secret was, they never penetrated it. Nobody would ever quite know, truly know, what he had shared with Minto in those early days. The poor P’daytabird certainly knew nothing of it. Sometimes, in the glass, Jack saw his father’s face staring back at him, and all that world came back – of hot days in Strandtown, when their heavily tweeded father led the two boys indoors for steaming roast meat. ‘Well, boys, this is grand.’

  Friday, 22 November was a day to be graven in the history of the Western world, since it was the day that John F. Kennedy drove to Dallas and met his assassin. Shortly after six, Warnie looked in on his brother and met a cheerful ‘I’m all right’. Breakfast was as usual, after which he managed to get dressed and answer four letters. He had difficulty, however, in keeping awake, and when Warnie found him slumped asleep in his chair after lunch he advised him to get into bed. At four, Warnie brought him tea and found him very drowsy, and very thick in his speech. He was ‘calm and cheerful’. One and a half hours later, Warnie heard a crash and ran into the room. Jack was lying at the foot of the bed, unconscious. He was still breathing, but some three or four minutes later he ceased to do so.

  –TWENTY-ONE–

  FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN

  Since Lewis died on the very day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated (it was also, as it happened, the day that Aldous Huxley died in California), his death was noted by the newspapers, but did not attract as much notice as it would have done on a less eventful day. Since he himself despised ‘news’, this would not much have troubled him.

  Warnie was in any case anxious that the funeral should be private, and he gave instructions to Father Head, the vicar of the parish church, that there should be no prior notice of when the obsequies were to take place. Word got round among a small handful of friends, who assembled at the Headington Quarry church to bury Lewis on 26 November 1963, a Tuesday. Head had previously celebrated a requiem mass, and J. R. R. Tolkien, who attended the funeral with his son Christopher, had arranged for a Roman Catholic mass to be said at the church of St Aloysius. Others present included Lewis’s old pupil and future biographer George Sayer, his stepson Douglas Gresham, Maureen and Leonard Blake, and Fred Paxford the gardener. Everyone waited for Warnie to appear, but he did not come. One can safely say that, since the catastrophe of 1908 when he lost his mother, Warnie had suffered no more devastating loss. He is not the only person who has been unable to face the funeral of someone truly dear to him. Queen Victoria was unable to bring herself to attend the funeral of Prince Albert; Samuel Johnson missed the funeral of his wife. Warnie spent 26 November lying in bed drinking whisky.

  Lewis was buried in the churchyard, and when Warnie chose the gravestone, he had carved on it the words from King Lear which had been on the calendar of Flora Lewis’s bedroom on the day she died: Men must endure their going hence. Warnie was not equipped to endure Jack’s departure, but he was doomed to live for another miserable nine and a half years without him. He would let The Kilns and move out to live with Len and Mollie Miller, who had been the servants there in latter years. Sometimes he would move back again to The Kilns or take to his travels, inconsolable without Jack. Sometimes the Savers in Malvern would have him to stay. Jill and Clement (Clé) Freud let him spend his holidays at their house in Walberswick, on the Suffolk coast. Clement Freud, he noted in 1968, ‘now wears a beard and moustache, looks astonishingly like Edward VII’s photos in early life. It’s not only the hairiness which produces the resemblance, but the rather prominent dull heavily lidded eyes. Not that Clé is dull, far from it … ’

  In some moods he wished to sell The Kilns, not necessarily the easiest thing to do, since it had fallen into a poor state; there was fungus growing on the walls of the bathroom even before Jack died. Warnie and Maureen Blake, who owned the place jointly, seemed to be unable to agree on the details of the sale, and Warnie confided angrily to his journal that ‘time was when Maureen would have stood a good
chance of being burnt as a witch’. His irascibility, always a marked feature of his character, was poured into the pages of his diary, and no one escaped except his beloved Jack. He remembered furiously ‘the winter when Joy and her brats burnt the whole of our winter coal ration while we were in Ireland’.

  These cries of hurt sprang largely from the intolerable feeling that he wanted to be with Jack, and the knowledge that this was impossible. There were very long spells when Warnie was sober, and if he felt the need for a truly heroic ‘bender’, he tried to arrange for it to happen in Ireland. When the worst of it was over, he found a welcome with the nuns of Our Lady of Lourdes.

  Warnie’s natural instinct as a historian had been to keep records and compile documents. From early days in the Little End Room, he had been doing so, and his life’s work when he came out of the Army had been to put together the monumental Lewis Papery. It was natural that he should have taken a great interest in the preservation of his brother’s archives, and in making some kind of permanent literary memorial to him, and he began to prepare an edition of Jack’s letters. This was published in 1966.

  Warnie, however, was not the only scholar to take an interest in Jack’s letters, manuscripts and literary remains. There was, for example, Walter Hooper, the young man from Kentucky who had come to Oxford in 1963. Hooper is one of nature’s devotees, and he had hero-worshipped C. S. Lewis for many years. He had an ambition to write the life of Lewis, and to undertake a study of his works, possibly as a B.Litt. or D.Phil. student in the English Faculty at Oxford. The evidence suggests that Lewis had been flattered and pleased by Hooper’s attentions, while at the same time wondering, particularly after he had allowed Hooper to stay at The Kilns, what he had let himself in for. He had written to his friend Roger Lancelyn Green only a few weeks after Hooper’s arrival to spell out the embarrassing fact that although Green had been designated, by Lewis himself, to write a biography of him when he was dead, Hooper was engaged on the same quest, and there might be some clash of interests unless they were to collaborate. This they eventually did.

  With C. S. Lewis dead, Hooper’s plans to become closer-acquainted with his hero were shattered, but he reappeared in Oxford in 1964 and befriended Warnie. In his introduction to They Stand Together (Lewis’s letters to Arthur Greeves), Hooper tells us, ‘Warnie welcomed me as though I were already as much his friend as I had been Jack’s and it soon became clear that it had been given to me to care for Warren Lewis.’ This arrangement certainly had its advantages for Warnie, since Hooper is a kind man who was prepared to offer him companionship in his alcoholic phases, when other friends fought shy of him. When even the nuns of Drogheda found Warnie’s visits too disruptive, Hooper wrote,

  This threw us on the only resource that Oxford offered, the Warneford Hospital which is a mental institution but which affords treatment to alcoholics when there is nowhere else for them to go. Warnie resisted this as long as he could, with unfortunate results for both of us. His ‘resistance’ meant that he would sit in his study chair for as long as a fortnight without getting up, eating nothing, and drinking as much as six bottles of whisky a day. As he could not distinguish night from day I had to be constantly on call, and as a result I passed more than a year without a single night of unbroken sleep. Not even then could I bear him any ill will.1

  Alas, this spirit of Christian charity was not always reciprocated. Warnie profoundly resented his spells of incarceration in the Warneford Hospital, and in his darker moods, he suspected Hooper of mixed motives. His diaries express fear that Hooper was taking too much control of the C. S. Lewis literary estate, and even on occasion express the surely unreasonable dread that Hooper was actually appropriating manuscripts behind his back. A drama not dissimilar to that of Henry James’s The Aspern Papers was being enacted, with Hooper cast, in Warnie’s mind, in the role of ‘the publishing scoundrel’.

  There is no evidence that Hooper has ever sought to make financial gain from his association with Lewis, and his work for the C. S. Lewis estate during the last quarter-century has been tireless. Nevertheless, Warnie felt strong misgivings that Owen Barfield, who had no inclination for the work himself but who was Lewis’s literary executor, should have entrusted Hooper with the task of presiding over the estate and of publishing, as he has done in a regular stream, many of the fragmentary works of C. S. Lewis which have appeared since his death and which have perhaps done little to enhance his reputation. Hooper is not the villain that some have imagined, though it could be said that in his unwavering devotion to Lewis’s memory, love has occasionally blossomed into fantasy. As one who has lived and breathed C. S. Lewis for most of his adult life, even changing his handwriting so that it now resembles that of the Master, it is understandable that he should have come to believe that he was much closer to Lewis than was in life the case. By the time Lewis’s posthumous volume of essays, God in the Dock, edited by Hooper, appeared in 1970, for example, the American publishers’ blurb was describing Hooper as ‘a long-time friend and for some years personal secretary of C. S. Lewis’. In 1975, Hooper was able to share with a New York audience his memories of what had passed between himself and Lewis when they attended church together ‘one Easter’, a curious slip of the tongue when it is remembered that in the days of his flesh Lewis only knew Hooper in the high summer of 1963, some months after Easter had passed.

  For Warnie, the development of the C. S. Lewis industry, presided over by Hooper, simply became a bore. ‘CSL’s home,’ he grumbled to his diary, ‘complete with the great man’s brother, is now a show piece for any American who happens to visit Oxford … And what is the worst of it is that this situation is going to continue for the rest of my life … I suppose that on my death-bed – or at any rate on the day before – I shall have some verbose American standing over me and lecturing on some little observed significance of J’s work. Oh, damn, damn, DAMN!’

  Hooper exhausted him with his quest for C. S. Lewis memorabilia, and with his assumption that Warnie would be available for the troop of American pilgrims who now wished to beat a path to ‘the great man’s brother’. He complained to his diary of Hooper’s ‘gadfly adhesiveness’. ‘A ferret could take Walter’s correspondence course with advantage.’ Walter ‘should have been either a detective or better still a journalist’. He ‘has the hide of a hippopotamus or rather I’m afraid he’s quite indifferent as to whether I like having American vagrants thrust on me or not.’

  One of the Americans who came to see Warnie was Clyde S. Kilby of Wheaton College, Illinois. He had been a penfriend of C. S. Lewis’s and took a particular interest in the Inklings. At the Wheaton library he was building up a collection of manuscripts and memorabilia relating to this circle, and in the summer of 1966, when he was over to see J. R. R. Tolkien for discussions about The Silmarillion, he came out to Headington to visit Warnie. ‘I took to him,’ Warnie wrote, ‘tho’ he is a teetotaller and a non-smoker, being a Baptist to whom both these things are forbidden. He is one of that nice type of American about whom there is a faint suggestion of childishness, something of the dog which with wagging tail appeals to you to like him.’

  From mis point onwards, though it did not become immediately clear, a rivalry grew up between Clyde S. Kilby and Walter Hooper. Warnie tacitly expressed which side he was on by leaving his own diaries and papers to Wheaton College in his will. He eventually died on 9 April 1973.

  The disputes between scholars and the guardians of C. S. Lewis’s memory are unedifying, but they reflect something much more than a learned debate or a purely mercenary desire to lay hands on valuable manuscripts. Indeed, despite the claims of cynics, mere would appear to have been very little element of avarice in these wrangles. What was emerging was a profound divergence of imaginative views of rival mythologies. Those who have been witnesses to the spectacle have been able to observe in microcosm something which is perhaps symptomatic of the religious temperament as a whole, the need to erect images and to worship them. The Marion E. Wade Cente
r at Wheaton College keeps alive the image of an evangelical Lewis, simple in his devotion to ‘mere Christianity’, and theologically preoccupied almost to the exclusion of all other interests. It is not a wholly false picture; Lewis himself had a hand in building up this persona both in his published religious writings and in his letters to those thousands who wrote to him for clarification in their own religious search. In the reverent atmosphere of the Center, seated at the very table which once stood in Lewis’s college rooms, the visitor shares a place with innocent-looking college kids in white socks, blue jeans and sneakers, turning the pages of the Narnia books. Meanwhile the Curator of the Center, Lyle Dorsett, brings out transcripts of conversations which he has been able to have with survivors from the Inklings and their friends. He has cast his net wide. Turning away from the Pauline Baynes illustrations of Narnia, the bright maps and the sweet fauns and beavers, one reads of a conversation with an old gentleman called Major Henry, a vague connection of Mrs Moore’s who used to drive Jack and Warnie about on their Irish holidays. Henry remembers, ‘Well, when they were in the car Jack didn’t talk as if he was particularly … as if he was very keen on Christianity. He just was ordinary.’ There follows an account of what happened when they got to the hotel, and of Warnie’s behaviour in the dining-room. ‘He never really passed out properly except when we were staying – when we were going to remain on at a hotel. And on one occasion he passed out at the dinner table. And I got up and went over to the head waiter and asked him to take my friend to his room. And he and another waiter did so.’