C. S. Lewis

by Roger Lancelyn Green

  * Francis Warner (1937– ), distinguished poet and dramatist, was born in Bishopthorpe, Yorkshire, and was educated at Christ’s Hospital, London College of Music, and St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. On completing his doctorate, Dr Warner was Supervisor in English at St Catharine’s College, 1963–5. In 1965 he was appointed Lord White Fellow in English Literature and Senior English Tutor at St Peter’s College, Oxford. On his retirement in 1999, he was made an Honorary Fellow of St Catharine’s College. His output of poems and plays has been vast, and they include Early Poems (1965), Madrigals (1967), Maquettes: A Trilogy of Plays (1972), Meeting Ends (1974), Spring Harvest (1981), Living Creation (1985), King Francis I (1995), Nightingales: Poems 1985–1996 (1997), and Rembrandt’s Mirror (2000). He has won awards for his work from many countries. See Francis Warner: Poet and Dramatist, ed. Tim Prentki (1977) and Glyn Pursglove, Francis Warner and Tradition: An Introduction to the Plays (1981).

  * The surgeon, Dr Anthony Stedman Till.

  NOTES

  1 ‘In Cambridge’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 99.

  2 Ibid., pp. 99–100.

  3 Ibid., pp. 101–2.

  4 Billy Graham, Just as I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (1997), p. 258.

  5 C.S.Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, p. 639.

  6 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 30.

  7 Ibid.

  8 Letters, p. 451.

  9 Clifford Morris, ‘A Christian Gentleman’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, pp. 195–6.

  10 ‘Reminiscences’ (1) Magdalene, 1948–58, Magdalene College Magazine and Record, New Series, No. 34 (1989–90), pp. 45–9.

  11 Private collection.

  12 ‘In Cambridge’, C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 103.

  13 Ibid., pp. 100–1.

  14 Letters, p. 458.

  15 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 83.

  16 The Times (8 August 1958), p. 5.

  17 Ibid.

  18 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 83.

  19 Bodleian Library, Dep. 772, fol. 497.

  20 The Four Loves, ch. 4, p. 69.

  21 TST, p. 534.

  22 George Sayer, Jack: C.S. Lewis and his Times (1988), ch. 19, p. 221.

  23 BF, p. 245.

  24 Sayer, Jack, ch. 19, p. 222.

  25 ‘Of More than Academic Interest’, the cover story about Shadowlands in the ‘Culture’ section of the Sunday Times (27 February 1994), p. 2.

  26 Letters, p. 461.

  27 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 67.

  28 From Peter Bide’s account of the marriage in CG, p. 634.

  29 BF, pp. 245–6.

  30 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett, c. 835, fol. 68.

  31 Marion E. Wade Center, Wheaton College.

  32 The Great Divorce, ch. 13, p. 102.

  33 Letters, p. 466.

  34 Ibid., p. 470

  35 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, p. 256.

  36 Ibid., p. 341.

  37 Mere Christianity, Bk III, ch. 6, p. 92.

  38 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, pp. 60–1.

  39 ‘Memoir’, pp. 44–5.

  40 TST, p. 544.

  41 Ibid.

  42 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. c. 50, fol. 5.

  43 Letters, pp. 470–1.

  44 ‘Approach to English’, Light on C.S. Lewis, p. 63.

  45 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 861, fols 103–4.

  46 Letters, p. 474.

  47 Ibid.

  48 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 2724, fol. 44.

  49 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 82.

  50 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/4, fol. 28.

  51 Marion E. Wade Center.

  52 ‘Announcing Dr Lewis’, The Living Church, vol. 137 (28 September 1958), p. 26.

  53 Ibid. (23 November 1958), p. 26.

  54 Marion E. Wade Center.

  55 Talk Six, ‘Eros’, Part I, A Series of Ten Radio Talks on Love (Atlanta: The Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation, 1959), p. 4. Much the same material is found in The Four Loves, ch. 5, p. 93.

  56 Lambeth Palace Archives.

  57 G.A. Chase, A Companion to The Revised Psalter (1963), pp. 1–2.

  58 Lambeth Palace Archives.

  59 C.S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table, p. 101.

  60 Francis Warner’s account of his tutorials with Lewis is found in CG, pp. 92–4.

  61 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fol. 184.

  62 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 835, fol. 97.

  63 Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 771/4, fol. 497.

  64 Mrs Zernov’s photographs are published in Walter Hooper, Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C.S. Lewis (1982), pp. 138–9.

  65 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fols 186–7.

  66 BF, pp. 248–9.

  67 Gresham, Lenten Lands, ch. 13, p. 121.

  68 BF, p. 249.

  69 Ibid., p. 250.

  70 Ibid., p. 251.

  71 ‘Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman’, Collected Poems, p. 252.

  14

  ‘THE TERM IS OVER’

  ‘Perhaps being maddeningly busy is the best thing for me,’ Lewis wrote to Vera Gebbert on 5 August 1960. ‘Anyway, I am. This is one of those things which makes the tragedies of real life so very unlike those of the stage.’

  It is ironic that the day after Joy died, 14 July 1960, Lewis had an appointment to talk about the stage. The musician Donald Swann* had been haunted for years by the beauty of Lewis’s interplanetary novel, Perelandra, and he talked to his fellow musician, David Marsh, about making it into an opera. They wrote to Lewis about their ideas and found him sympathetic. For whatever reason, Lewis did not cancel his appointment with Donald Swann and David Marsh for 14 July, and years later Donald Swann recorded in his autobiography, Swann’s Way:

  There is one episode I shall always remember. This was during one of our occasional meetings when David and I were starting on Perelandra. It was a quiet morning and we went to Lewis’s home in Oxford for breakfast. We strolled around his lovely garden with him, talking about the opera. After about an hour he said: ‘I hope you will excuse me. I must go now because my wife died last night.’ He left us. I was very moved. Quite overcome. It is just another story of this very gracious gentleman who always looked after his guests. I mean, at a time like that! What did we matter?

  Of all the interruptions Lewis might have had during this time, this was certainly one of the most pleasant. He met Donald Swann and David Marsh again for talk on 8 September and the three of them had lunch together on 20 September. Over the next three years they proceeded to set Perelandra to music.

  Before these other meetings with Swann and Marsh, Lewis met Joy’s first husband, Bill Gresham. Not long before she died, Joy and Bill had been planning his trip to Oxford so that he could see her and the boys. Joy last wrote to him on 2 July about things he might bring David and Douglas. Lewis sent a note to Gresham on the day of the funeral saying, ‘Joy died on the 13th July. This need make no change in your plans, but I thought you should arrive knowing it.’ Bill Gresham travelled by ship and arrived in Oxford on 3 August to find that Lewis had booked him a room at the Old Black Horse Inn in St Clement’s Street. Lewis met him several times during his stay.

  Although Jack had told the boys that their father’s visit would ‘probably cheer us all up’, it was awkward for everyone. Besides losing Joy, it was clear to Gresham that he had lost his sons as well. Writing about the reunion with his father years later, Douglas said: ‘I was an English schoolboy by then … so I shook his hand and said, “How do you do, sir?” In truth, I confess I felt no emotion for him at all. He was a stranger; we could not bridge the gap of the years of separation. We spent considerable time together and became friends, but really that was all. When he left to go back to America and his new family, I missed him less than I did before he had come.’ Being a year older, David remembered his father better, b
ut they had been separated too long for him to feel much. Gresham returned home on 15 August, and it was not long before he was ill himself.

  Warnie went to Ireland on 25 July and Mother Mary Martin was soon in touch with Jack: his brother was in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. ‘W. is away on his Irish holiday’, Jack wrote to Arthur on 30 August, ‘and has, as usual, drunk himself into hospital. Douglas – the younger boy – is, as always, an absolute brick, and a very bright spot in my life. I’m quite well myself. In fact, by judicious diet and exercise, I’ve brought myself down from 13 stone to just under 11.’

  Lewis was unable to leave The Kilns until Warnie returned. But, as so often, he followed the advice he had given Arthur all those years ago, ‘Start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’ What became A Grief Observed began with a few observations made to Austin and Katharine Farrer. Writing to them on 22 July, he said, ‘There are a lot of things about sorrow which no one (least of all the tragedians) have told me. I never dreamed that, in between the moments of acute suffering, it would be so like somnambulism or like being slightly drunk. Nor, physically, often so like fear.’ He wrote to Katharine Farrer again on 25 July, using some of the very words found in A Grief Observed: ‘I’m learning a good many things about grief which the novelists and poets never told me. It has as many different facets as love or anger or any other passion. In the lulls – between the peaks – there is something in it very like fidgety boredom: like just “hanging about waiting” – tho’ what the deuce one thinks one is waiting for I don’t know.’

  Shortly after making those observations, Lewis began writing A Grief Observed, a powerful work of Christian apologetics based on the grief caused by Joy’s death. When Roger Lancelyn Green visited The Kilns between 31 August and 2 September 1960 Lewis showed him the manuscript. The possibility of its publication was mentioned to Green under pledge of secrecy.

  Lewis had a typescript made of the work and gave it to his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, when they had lunch together on 21 September. He explained that he did not want to draw attention to himself. For this reason, he had decided to publish under the pseudonym Dimidius – Latin for ‘halved’ or ‘divided in two’. In choosing this particular name he almost certainly had in mind something he remembered about Charles Williams: ‘There lived in Williams a sceptic and even a pessimist. No man – and least of all the common run of antitheists – could have written a better attack on Christianity than he. He used to say that if he were rich enough to build a church he would dedicate it to St Thomas Didymus Sceptic.’

  To deflect attention, Spencer Curtis Brown did not offer the book to Lewis’s usual publishers, Geoffrey Bles, but sent the typescript to Faber & Faber, one of whose directors was T.S. Eliot. On 24 October 1960 Curtis Brown wrote to Lewis, ‘I know that the enclosed copy of the letter from T.S. Eliot will give you pleasure.’ Eliot had replied to Curtis Brown on 20 October 1960:

  I and two other Directors have read A Grief Observed. My wife has read it also, and we have all been deeply moved by it. We do in fact want to publish it …

  We are of the opinion that we have guessed the name of the author. If, as you intimate and as I should expect from the man I think it is, he does sincerely want anonymity, we agree that a plausible English pseudonym would hold off enquirers better than Dimidius. The latter is sure to arouse curiosity and there must be plenty of other people amongst those who know him, and perhaps even amongst the readers of his work who do not know him, who may be able to penetrate the disguise once they set their minds working.

  This was not entirely an inspired guess. One of the directors mentioned in Eliot’s letter was Charles Monteith, who had been one of Lewis’s pupils at Magdalen College. While reading the typescript he recognized some of Lewis’s handwritten corrections.

  In any event, Lewis saw the force of Eliot’s argument, and he devised a new pseudonym for himself. He had used the name ‘Nat Whilk’ or ‘N.W.’ – Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’ – for many years. He now combined that with ‘Clerk’, which in medieval usage meant ‘scholar’, and came up with the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The book was published on 29 September 1961 as by N.W. Clerk and, until it came out under his own name in 1964, few ‘penetrated the disguise’.

  Having given him time to be alone, Lewis’s friends now rallied round. Austin Farrer became Warden of Keble College in 1960, and he and Katharine invited him to the Warden’s Lodgings for dinner on 15 September. Roger and June Lancelyn Green urged him to come up to Cheshire for a visit beginning on 24 September. This, however, depended upon Warnie’s being at home. Douglas was joining his elder brother at Magdalen College School for the Michaelmas Term of 1960, and as they were day-boys someone had to be in charge at The Kilns. Lewis wrote to Roger on 15 September:

  Oh Hell! What a trial I am to you both! If Warnie really came home on the 23rd – and if he did not come home so drunk as to have to be put straight into a nursing home – I could and would with delight come to you on the 24th. But neither is really at all probable. And of course I can’t leave this house with no grown-up in charge. What it comes to is that you must count me out. I am very sorry. Don’t make any further efforts to accommodate such an entangled man as me.

  The holiday in Cheshire had to be abandoned, but Warnie returned in time for Jack to go back to Cambridge on 5 October. Lewis had been elected a member of the Athenaeum Club in London in 1957 – one of his proposers having been Bishop Harry Carpenter – and he spent the night of 6 October in the Athenaeum in order to attend the Committee on the Revision of the Psalms at Lambeth Palace the next morning. Then back to Cambridge to begin his lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’ for Michaelmas Term. When Francis Warner met Lewis for his next tutorial he found him wearing a black tie. ‘My wife has just died,’ explained Lewis.

  When not lecturing, Lewis was busy with a new Screwtape project. He had found the writing of the original Screwtape Letters a ‘stifling experience’ and he was resolved never to write any more Letters. Even so, a few years later he found that the idea of ‘something like a lecture or “address” hovered vaguely’ in his mind. ‘Then came an invitation from the Saturday Evening Post, and that, he said, ‘pressed the trigger’. The result was ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of 19 December 1959. Before the ‘Toast’ was completed Lewis began planning what he called ‘The Whole Screwtape’ – a volume that combined the original Letters, the new ‘Toast’, and a new preface. He completed the preface and sent it to his publisher, Jock Gibb, on 15 December. The ‘Whole Screwtape’ involved so many small problems that Lewis became tetchy.

  ‘Drat that omnibus!’ he wrote to Gibb on 9 October 1960. In the first of the original Letters Screwtape writes about how he tempted a ‘Patient’ reading in the British Museum. (This was before the British Library moved into a separate building from the British Museum.) Screwtape said that once the young man had left the Museum and ‘was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up along with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” … was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true.’

  For the last twenty years readers had been complaining that it was impossible to see a no. 73 bus from the British Museum. Gibb wanted to finally settle the matter of what could and could not be seen ‘from the British Museum’ before they published the new Screwtape Letters. ‘It need not be visible from the B.M.,’ Lewis said in his letter of 9 October. ‘It need be visible only in some neighbouring street which the patient might see on his way to or from lunch. If you can provide the number of any bus that might be seen in some such neighbouring street, and then emend street to streets in the last line of p. 24, we shall have saved our bacon. If this is impossible, then take your choice of
green coach, jeep, fire engine, Rolls, police car, or ambulance.’

  The problem was solved at last. Lewis ‘saved his bacon’ by altering the original words ‘Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past’ to read ‘Once he was in the streets the battle was won. I showed him …’ Lewis had a final meeting with Gibb on 30 November to discuss the book, and The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, with a New Preface was published on 27 February 1961.

  Lewis next found himself in a violent tussle with the ‘Leavisites’ – the followers of F.R. Leavis. In his ‘Interim Report’ of 1956 he had pointed out that Cambridge was dominated by literary criticism and that one was never safe from ‘the Critic’. The School of English was still a very recent addition to the universities, and Lewis had worried about its practice of criticism degenerating into little more than a parade of feelings.

  Lewis had started work on An Experiment in Criticism before he broke off to write A Grief Observed. Back in Cambridge he resumed work on it. Meanwhile, the Leavisites were preparing an attack. Their dislike of Lewis went deep, but their attack was occasioned by a comment on undergraduate criticism Lewis wrote for the 9 March 1960 issue of the little Cambridge Broadsheet:

  The faults I find in contemporary undergraduate criticism are these: (1) In adverse criticism their tone is that of personal resentment. They are more anxious to wound the author than to inform the reader. Adverse criticism should diagnose and exhibit faults, not abuse them. (2) They are far too ready to advance or accept radical reinterpretations of works which have already been before the world for several generations. The prima facie improbability that these have never till now been understood is ignored. (3) Most European literature was composed for adult readers who knew the Bible and the Classics. It is not the modern student’s fault that he lacks this background; but he is insufficiently aware of his lack and of the necessity for extreme caution which it imposes on him. He should think twice before discovering ‘irony’ in passages which everyone has hitherto taken ‘straight’. (4) He approaches literature with the wrong kind of seriousness. He uses as a substitute for religion or philosophy or psychotherapy works which were intended as divertissements. The nature of the comic is a subject for serious consideration; but one needs to have seen the joke and taken it as a joke first.