C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  Lewis mentioned this ‘substitution’ to several friends. Nevill Coghill recalled that shortly after his marriage Lewis brought Joy to lunch at Merton College. ‘He said to me, looking at her across the grassy quadrangle, “I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.” It was then that he told me of having been allowed to accept her pain. “You mean” (I said) “that her pain left her, and that you felt it for her in your body?” “Yes,” he said, “in my legs. It was crippling. But it relieved hers.”’44 When Lewis wrote to his godson, Laurence Harwood, the son of his old friend Cecil Harwood, on 12 December 1957 he was feeling better: ‘All my news is good. My wife has made an almost miraculous, certainly an unexpected, recovery. I myself am quite free from pain again now. I have to wear a surgical belt, though: a thing like my mother’s, or your grandmother’s corsets! It’s surprising how one gets used to the contraption – except when one wants to scratch some part which it covers.’45

  Shortly after this, Michael Peto took some photographs of Lewis and Joy, one of which accompanied Lewis’s article, ‘Willing Slaves of the Welfare State’, in The Observer (29 July 1958). The pains accepted by Lewis are evident in his face. One of Lewis’s correspondents, Mrs John Watt, mentioned it to him, and the least vain of men said in his reply of 28 August 1958 that the picture made him look like a ‘dyspeptic orangutan’.46 When he and Walter Hooper looked at the Peto photographs together, Lewis thought he looked ‘at least 120 years old’. But the pain he accepted with grace and never complained.

  In fact, the letter to Mrs Watt he described a holiday he and Joy had with Arthur Greeves during the first two weeks of July 1958:

  We had a holiday – you might call it a belated honeymoon – in Ireland and were lucky enough to get that perfect fortnight at the beginning of July. We visited Louth, Down, and Donegal, and returned drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just beginning to bloom. We flew to Ireland, for though both of us would prefer ship to plane, her bones, and even mine, could not risk a sudden lurch. It was the first flight either of us had ever experienced, and we found it, after our initial moment of terror, enchanting. The cloud-scape seen from above is a new world of beauty – and then the rifts in the clouds through which one sees (like Tennyson’s Tithonus) ‘a glimpse of that dark world where I was born’.47

  While in Ireland, they stayed a week at the Old Inn near Arthur’s home in Crawfordsburn. One day Jack invited his Irish relations to meet his bride. The guests included Jack’s cousins, Dr and Mrs Joseph Lewis, and their daughter Joan. Joy was taken to Belfast to meet Jack’s and Warnie’s old and valued friend Jane McNeill. From Crawfordsburn they drove to Rathmullan, on Lough Swilly in County Donegal, where they spent a week in the Royal Fort Hotel.

  As soon as Joy was on her feet, with no immediate fear of a relapse, she set about putting The Kilns to rights and bringing comfort into what had become a rather uncomfortable abode. ‘I grow stronger daily,’ Joy wrote to Katharine Farrer on 30 January 1958, ‘– can now drive about freely, and rush about the house like mad, scaring dogs and cats and making up fires and opening windows … but everywhere I go I see more things that need repair! If one moves the books, the walls fall in.’48 ‘“The Kilns” is now a real home,’ Joy wrote to Green on 23 May 1958, ‘with paint on the walls, ceilings properly repaired, clean sheets on the beds – we can receive and put up several guests … I’ve got a fence round the woods and all the trespassers chased away; I shoot a starting pistol at them and they run like anything! We’d love a visit.’49

  This brief halcyon period was perhaps the happiest time of Lewis’s life. The male friendships in which he had always delighted remained unimpaired; he had received from Cambridge the Chair which his own university had failed to award to him, and was happier in Magdalene than he had been of late at Magdalen, finding the smaller Cambridge college much closer to the Oxford of his youth; in term-time he had both the Combination Room and the frequent visits of older friends who travelled to his new university with him on a Monday afternoon following the gathering at the ‘Bird and Baby’ to spend the evening with him; and he had his own home at The Kilns for most weekends in term-time and throughout the vacations, with a wife who as a friend was able and eager to meet him and any friend of his on equal terms as if she too were an Inkling, but was also fast becoming the lover whom he had failed to find.

  During the autumn of 1957, when Lewis and Joy were settling into their married life, Lewis had somehow found the time to write Reflections on the Psalms. He had just finished this when, in January 1958, he and Joy were discussing a request Jack had received from the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation of Atlanta, Georgia. The Foundation had been founded in the 1940s by a remarkable laywoman, Dr Caroline Rakestraw, who believed that the radio should be used as a means of evangelization, and had put together a board of trustees including some of the senior bishops of the Episcopal Church. Encouraged by Chad Walsh, one of the trustees, Bishop H.I. Loutit of South Florida, approached Lewis about making some tape recordings to be played over the air in the United States. Lewis wrote to Bishop Loutit on 5 January 1958 agreeing to the suggestion, which had brought to mind as a theme Orual’s abuse of the ‘loves’ in Till We Have Faces: ‘The subject I want to say something about in the near future in some form or other is the four loves – Storge, Philia, Eros and Agape. This seems to bring in nearly the whole of Christian ethics.’50

  The scripts of the ‘Four Loves’ were completed soon after Lewis and Joy returned from Ireland, and Lewis met Caroline Rakestraw in London on 19–20 August 1958 where he recorded the talks. Things did not go smoothly. Lewis kept imagining that Dr Rakestraw’s name was ‘Cartwheel’. But it was Joy who was most annoyed. ‘Why did you get my poor Jack mixed up with the insufferable Rakestraw, or whatever her name was?’ Joy wrote to Chad Walsh on 29 December 1958:

  She began by criticizing his opening words – ‘Today I want to discuss …’ ‘Professor Lewis, couldn’t you say instead Let us think together, you and I, about …’ No, he couldn’t. ‘But we want you to give the feeling of embracing them!’ Jack said if they wanted an embracer they had the wrong man. ‘Well, perhaps I mean a feeling of involvement …’ Ugh! At the end she made him sit absolutely silent before the microphone for a minute and a half ‘so they could feel his living presence.’51

  Things were to get much worse. After the tapes were taken to Atlanta the Foundation began a huge advertising campaign which made it sound as if Lewis would be in the United States giving the talks. An article appeared in the Episcopal Church’s magazine, The Living Church: ‘C.S. Lewis, Churchman, author, lecturer, philosopher, and professor of English at Cambridge University, will speak to American radio audiences in 1959 on the weekly Episcopal Hour program, March 29 to May 31.’52

  These plans were made, however, before the bishops on the board of the Foundation knew what Lewis had said about love. On listening to the tapes they decided they were ‘too frank for the American people’. The whole series was cancelled, and an article, ‘Love Talks’, appeared in The Living Church:

  Ten talks on love by C.S. Lewis, originally announced as the spring offering of the Episcopal Radio Hour, led to some lively discussion among those responsible for the program when they listened to tape-recorded previews. The noted English author had pulled no punches in discussing sex and explaining its place in the Christian view of love. The combination of a high intellectual level and startling frankness seemed to demand a specific type of audience, rather than a place in the format of this well established segment of the Protestant Hour Network … The C.S. Lewis talks will be channelled into college and urban communities for a more sophisticated audience.53

  ‘Now we learn,’ Joy wrote to Chad Walsh on 29 December 1958, ‘not from the organization, but through a friend – that they decided to suppress the whole series because of Jack’s “startling frankness” in sexual matters.’54

 
It fell to Mrs Rakestraw to explain to Lewis why some of her backers found his talks on Eros objectionable. Lewis told Walter Hooper that Mrs Rakestraw had said to him, ‘Professor Lewis, I’m afraid you brought sex into your talks on Eros,’ to which he replied, ‘My dear Mrs Cartwheel, how can you talk about Eros and leave it out?’ He told Hooper that it struck him as unthinkable that a country which peddled so much pornography could not bear to hear a Christian discussion of sex. Lewis thought one of the ‘offensive’ passages might have been that on Eros in which he said:

  Now the act of love – Venus, as our ancestors called it – has even on those terms its own inherent kind of gravity. But it is also possible to take it too seriously or with the wrong kind of seriousness, and especially today. A preposterous and ludicrous solemnization of sex has been going on almost since my life began. Nothing is more needed on this subject at the moment than a good outbreak of belly laughter … The technicians, so to call them, have so bedevilled us with the immense psychological importance of getting this act right, and the all but impossibility of doing so, that one imagines some young couples now go to it with the complete works of Freud, Krafft-Ebing, Dr Stopes, Havelock Ellis, laid out on bedtables all around them.55

  In the end Dr Rakestraw offered the talks to individual radio stations across the country, and they reached a narrower audience than they would have found had they been broadcast during the Episcopal Hour. Even so, Dr Rakestraw deserves enormous credit for producing the most impressive recordings ever made of Lewis. In 1970 she issued the talks for sale on cassettes entitled Four Talks on Love. Lewis afterwards used the scripts of these talks as a basis for his book The Four Loves, which was completed in June 1959 and published on 28 March 1960.

  Lewis and Joy were still busy with the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation when Reflections on the Psalms was published, on 8 September 1958. This had been a busy year for Warnie too. His third volume of French history, Assault on Olympus: The Rise of the House of Gramont was published in 1958, and he was working on a biography of Louis XIV. When Jack returned to Cambridge for Michaelmas Term 1958 to give his lectures on ‘English Literature: 1300–1500’, he left Joy and Warnie discussing the biography of Madame de Maintenon that Joy hoped to write.

  In Cambridge, Lewis received a letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, inviting him to become a member of the ‘Commission to Revise the Psalter’.56 The Commission’s terms of reference were ‘To produce for the consideration of the Convocations a revision of the text of the Psalter designed to remove obscurities and serious errors of translation yet such as to retain, as far as possible, the general character in style and rhythm of Coverdale’s version and its suitability for congregational use.’57 Lewis had used the Coverdale translation in Reflections on the Psalms, so he knew it well. He replied to the Archbishop on 14 November 1958: ‘I have thought over Your Grace’s letter and come to the conclusion that I cannot refuse to serve on this Commission if I am wanted. I wish I were better qualified, but there is no use in multiplying words about that.’58

  Lewis’s first meeting with the Commission to Revise the Psalms was in Lambeth Palace, home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, on 22 January 1959. The other members of the Commission were the Archbishop of York, the Most Rev. F.D. Coggan; the Rt Rev. G.A. Chase, Bishop of Ripon, 1946–59; J. Dykes Bower, organist of St Paul’s; Gerald H. Knight, Director of the Royal School of Church Music; and D. Winton Thomas, Regius Professor of Hebrew in the University of Cambridge. There was as well another scholar who, with Lewis, was invited to advise on literary merit – T.S. Eliot.

  Eliot was on holiday in the Bahamas at the time, and he and Lewis did not meet until the next meeting of the Commission at Lambeth on 13 April. It was a totally different meeting from that at the Mitre in the 1940s. Both men had mellowed, and Eliot had married Valerie Fletcher the same year that Lewis married Joy. They had much in common, and talking about it later to Walter Hooper, Lewis said, ‘You know I never liked Eliot’s poetry, or even his prose. But when we met this time I loved him.’

  Their work on the Psalms was done between 1959 and 1962, and consisted in revising the old translation that appeared in the Book of Common Prayer. Selected revisions appeared in 1961, and the whole in 1963 as The Revised Psalter. Lewis was asked to advise on several prayers in the proposed revision of the Prayer Book; and he had also been consulted on the translation of the New Testament for the New English Bible, which came out early in 1961.

  It was a delight to visit The Kilns in 1958 and 1959 and see the sheer happiness and contentment that Lewis was finding in his brief St Martin’s summer: the solicitude for his wife, the simple delight in her company, the argument, badinage and rollicking fun that betokened the perfect relationship. Lewis the Family Man was a role he accepted with kindly amusement – ‘see how I have dwindled into a husband!’ he quoted with delight; and there was a merry twinkle in his eye when he and Joy turned up to the plays and prizegivings at Dane Court, or discussed the achievements and shortcomings of the young with other parents. At this time Joy would occasionally come over to Cambridge, and Lewis would give luncheon or dinner parties in college at which she was able to act as hostess. ‘I think that he enjoyed these parties as much as we did,’ Dr Ladborough recalled. ‘He even enjoyed dining out.’59

  Green spent the night of 9 June 1959 as Lewis’s guest in Magdalene College, and they discussed a possible trip to Greece. To visit Greece was Joy’s great ambition. Lewis professed to take no interest in foreign travel: he had never been outside the British Isles, except to France as a boy and during the First World War, and declared that to see the site of a great story or historical event would detract from rather than add to his pleasure in it. But he was eager to take Joy if it were possible, and when Green, who had been there on a ‘Wings’ tour in April 1959, offered to make all the arrangements for a similar tour in April 1960, he jumped at the chance.

  Lewis had been in Cambridge for Easter Term 1959 giving the last of his lectures on ‘Some Difficult Words’. On 25 June he and Joy flew to Ireland for a fortnight’s holiday. They were met by Arthur Greeves, and during a week spent at the Old Inn at Crawfordsburn Arthur drove them south to the Carlingford Mountains in County Louth, that portion of the world Jack thought most resembled Narnia. From there they went to Rathmullan, where they spent several days in the Royal Fort Hotel. They arrived home on 10 July. As she had done on several occasions, Joy accompanied Lewis to Cambridge when he went over on 19 July. He had a meeting the next morning with the young man who turned out to be his last pupil.

  This was Francis Warner, a postgraduate at St Catharine’s College.* Lewis was asked to supervise his doctoral thesis on what became ‘A Bibliographical Edition of the Latin Text of De Occulta Philosophia by H. Cornelius Agrippa, edited together with a revision of the translation of the text published by J.F. in 1651’. Warner began his weekly tutorials with Lewis on 20 July 1959. ‘I went regularly, on Wednesday mornings, to Professor Lewis’s rooms in Magdalene,’ he said. Of the tutorials, he recalled:

  I lay awake most of Tuesday nights aware of my shortcomings in the three languages necessary for the task (Latin, Greek and Hebrew). My supervisor was generous with more than his time, though. To spare my blushes, he took the original volume in his hands, and with one finger travelling along the buckled lines, translated ‘off the cuff’, having told me to stop him when he went wrong. I took this to be his polite way of saying ‘Make a note where we differ and correct if you are wrong.’60

  Meanwhile, elsewhere in Cambridge, Lewis joined T.S. Eliot and the other members of the Commission to Revise the Psalter for their conference in Selwyn College on 20–22 July. Joy came over from Oxford at the end of the conference and she and Lewis had lunch with Eliot and his wife on 23 July.

  Meanwhile, excitement was building up about the possible trip to Greece, and Lewis wrote to Roger Lancelyn Green on 21 September with a note of the days (3–14 April) that would suit them best for a holiday in Athens, Rhodes and C
rete. Lewis had to return to Cambridge for Michaelmas Term 1959 to begin his lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’ and Green joined him there on 3 October to finalize the plans for Greece.

  This golden period for Lewis and Joy was not to last. Neither really expected it to last. Even so, when Lewis took Joy for a routine check at the Churchill Hospital on 13 October, they expected to find her condition unchanged. ‘The blow has fallen,’ Lewis wrote to Chad Walsh on 21 October 1959. ‘Joy’s last X-ray check revealed that cancer has returned in several parts of the skeleton.’61 And writing to Green on 25 November, he said: ‘This last check is the only one we approached without dread – her health seemed so complete. It is like being recaptured by the Giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle. Whether a second miracle will be vouchsafed us, or, if not, when the sentence will be inflicted, remains uncertain. It is quite possible she may be able to do the Greek trip next spring. Pray for us.’62

  With the return of Joy’s cancer the trip became more and more risky and problematical. But, although experiencing slowly increasing pain, she professed herself willing and eager to go, if he would take the risk. And when the time came Lewis took it gladly for her sake, both of them hiding from the Greens how desperate her condition was, though of course they realized that Joy was suffering considerably, and that a cure was no longer probable.

  It was agreed that Lewis and Joy would meet Green and his wife June at Heathrow Airport on Sunday 3 April 1960. Lewis told Walter Hooper that he and Joy were in the taxi and about to leave for the airport when Paxford – the original Puddleglum – came to see them off. Leaning through the window of the car, he said, ‘Well, Mr Jack, there was this bloke just going on over the wireless. Says an airplane just went down. Everybody killed – burnt beyond recognition. Did you hear what I said, Mr Jack? Burnt beyond recognition!’ ‘And on that note,’ said Lewis, ‘we flew to Greece.’