A Shiver of Wonder

by Derick Bingham

  Warren continued to have severe drinking problems and was admitted to the Ackland Nursing Home in Oxford in February 1949, when Jack was halfway through writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. By June 1949, Jack was in the Ackland himself, suffering, his doctor maintained, from exhaustion. Ordered to take a month’s rest, Jack wrote to his friend Arthur Greeves to tell him that he was “coming home” to Belfast for a month; it is interesting to note that for Jack Lewis “home” was still Belfast. This was despite his public fame as a Christian apologist based in Oxford. Time Magazine, for example, had featured him on its front cover (8 September 1947) across the United States, and Professor Chad Walsh in the Atlantic Monthly (September 1946) had called him “the Apostle to the Sceptics.” Despite his long association with Oxford and academia, when he was ordered to rest he wanted to go home. The landscape of Narnia was calling. Sadly, another drinking binge of Warren’s prevented the journey.

  Despite calls from at least two different American friends to take a holiday in the United States, Jack stayed closely tethered to his work. Warren settled down to continue his writing about seventeenth and eighteenth century France. He eventually had quite a few books published on the subject, and also read some of his work to The Inklings, who held him in deep affection. Jack was now well into his third Narnian story, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

  The autumn of 1949 brought Jack one of his greatest disappointments. On Thursday evening, 27 October 1949, no one turned up for The Inklings’ meeting. The Tuesday-morning gatherings continued, but one of the delights of Jack’s life was over. Jack’s comment that this life is but an inn by the side of the road proved to be true again and again. As he battled on for the cause of Christ’s kingdom, the Thursday-evening gatherings of The Inklings had been a comfort and an inspiration to him. They had given him security, reassurance, and downright happiness.

  “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all,” wrote the psalmist.4 Another affliction Jack faced was the harsh response his friend J. R. R. Tolkien gave to The Chronicles of Narnia. He never liked them; it is reckoned that he considered them to be superficial and to have been written too hastily. When Jack read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to Tolkien in February 1949, he reacted by saying that Jack had made a mistake in assembling too many mythical creatures in Narnia. Tolkien didn’t think it worked to have Father Christmas, a white witch, nymphs, fauns, and beavers all together in the same country. Since Jack held Tolkien’s opinion in very high esteem, he reeled under his criticism.

  The saviour of The Chronicles of Narnia turned out to be the Deputy Librarian of Merton College, Roger Lancelyn Green. The world owes Roger Green an incalculable debt. As a friend and former pupil of Jack’s, he enthusiastically encouraged Jack’s writing of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Roger Green gave the book high praise without which Jack probably would never have even completed writing the book, let alone have it published. Other friends praised the book while Jack was writing it; but Roger Green is singled out for having the greatest influence. He is a shining example of the truth of “the power-of-one.”

  History is full of other examples of this truth. One vote gave Oliver Cromwell control of the United Kingdom. One vote caused Charles I to be executed. One vote brought Texas into the Union. One vote gave Adolf Hitler control of the Nazi party. One man’s prayers (Moses’) saved Israel from being abandoned by God. One pair of trained eyes gave the world penicillin. In 1928 Sir Alexander Fleming made the accidental discovery of a blue mould growing in a petri dish lying amongst a lot of other dishes on his bench. A crater on the moon was named after him—maybe they ought to name one after Roger Lancelyn Green for saving The Chronicles of Narnia.

  But Lewis faced other afflictions at home. In April 1949, Janie Moore had fallen out of bed three times in one night, and consequently her situation needed constant attention. She was admitted to Restholme at 230 Woodstock Road, Oxford, a nursing home run by a Miss Watson. Again, Jack’s plans for a holiday in Ireland during 1950 were thwarted. He simply could not afford a holiday in addition to the cost of keeping Mrs. Moore in the nursing home. He visited the now senile Janie more or less daily. These were distressing visits, as Janie gradually returned to a state of infancy. She died on 12 June 1951 and was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington Quarry.

  Janie Moore’s death brought Jack Lewis release from a commitment that had lasted for thirty years. He was now free to visit friends, to travel more widely, and to escape the drudgeries of the past years of domestic life. He was also free to invite friends to stay with him at The Kilns. Yet there was something deeply mysterious about Jack’s relationship with Janie Moore. In it is to be found the virtues of loyalty to a promise and incredible kindness. His love for her may have been eros to begin with, but it most certainly became and ended with agape.

  As a sixteen-year-old, Jill Flewett arrived at The Kilns as an evacuee from London and spent two years there. She later wrote of the many happy times Janie and Jack had together, and how that Janie “adored him absolutely.” Now Lady Jill Freud, wife of Sir Clement, she is on record as saying that Janie’s “whole life was centred around him and around him alone. The running of the house, the cooking, the meals—everything she did was geared for Jack’s happiness and comfort.”5 I take it that what Lady Freud wrote is absolutely true. The horrendous times of the First World War had brought Jack and Janie together; and there is something noble in the way Jack protected and cared for Janie for the rest of her earthly life. If ever loyalty was tested, it was in Jack Lewis, and he came through with flying colours.

  Loss of The Inklings’ Thursday-evening meeting, loss of Janie Moore, criticism of his writing by one whom he honoured, Warren’s drinking binges—could there be any more disappointment for him? It came in the form of academic disappointment. Jack had already been championed by Tolkien for the Merton Professorship of Modern English Literature, but he discovered that other electors were against Jack. They pointed out that his most successful books were three novels and some popular religious or theological books. They thought his election would lower the status of the professorship, and even discredit the English school. When the Professorship of Poetry fell vacant, several of Jack’s friends nominated him. Again there was opposition, amongst other reasons for his up-front preaching of Christianity. One particular academic, who strongly disliked Jack’s Ulster background, skilfully used University politics and moved against him. Out of the thousands who were eligible to do so, less than four hundred of the Senior Members of the University voted, and the Professorship went to C. Day Lewis, who won by nineteen votes. Warren recorded in his diary that he was astonished at the virulence of the anti-Christian feeling.

  There were many admirable qualities in Jack’s Christian life, but one of the most commendable was his lack of bitterness in the face of disappointment. He could have lashed out against his critics, or turned in upon himself and become sour in spirit and full of self-pity. There was none of this. In a time of loss and disappointment, he proved the truth of Isaiah’s great statement about God:

  He gives power to the weak, and to those who have no might he increases strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall; but those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.6

  Even as Jack waited for trains, he had a practise of walking up and down the platform praying to the Lord. Such people soar, even in turbulent winds. In fact, turbulent winds seem to enable them to soar even higher. It is important to remember that some of the exquisite passages in The Chronicles of Narnia were written at a time of bleak crosswinds in the life of their author. This fact proves again the biblical truth that, although all things that happen to those who love God are not good in and of themselves, they always work together for good.7

  In March 1951, Jack returned home to Northern Ireland.
He stayed in the little County Down village of Crawfordsburn, near Bangor, where his friend Arthur Greeves had a cottage. Jack enjoyed staying at the seventeenth century “Old Inn,” which still enjoys a favourable reputation in the twenty-first century. Throughout the centuries it has played host to highwaymen, presidents, pop stars, and even Tsar Peter the Great. This time, it sheltered the creator of Narnia. Around him were the Holywood hills, and his spirit was deeply refreshed as he walked once more in his childhood haunts. He was home.

  Beginning in the Michaelmas Term of 1951, Magdalen College gave Jack a sabbatical year. Its purpose was to let him complete volume three of The Oxford History of English Literature, entitled English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. The work involved a mountain of reading in the Duke Humfrey’s Library, part of the Bodleian in Oxford. Jack read the complete works of about two hundred authors, including the entire works of Luther, Calvin, Sir Thomas More, and Tyndale. The book was a tour de force. It was radical, controversial, startling, deeply thoughtful, witty, and humorous. It was also compellingly readable in its magnificent sweep across sixteenth century English literature. From the point of view of Christianity, its third chapter holds great interest, since in it Jack looks in detail at “religious controversy and translation,” and how the sixteenth-century text reads on the page. He presents his opinion of the writing of leaders like Tyndale, Latimer, Cranmer, John Knox, Sir Thomas More, Richard Hooker, John Foxe, Cardinal William Allen, and John Donne. Jack shows that the Puritans, who wished to abolish episcopacy and remodel the Church of England on the terms which Calvin had laid down in Geneva, had doctrines not of terror but of joy and hope; and that the experience of the Reformation was one of relief and buoyancy. In the entire work, some literature was debunked and some exalted. John Donne was put in the caste of a minor poet. Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is not highly praised; his sonnets, though, receive very high accolades.

  The book got some excellent reviews; but for me the most adroit and perceptive summary was given in the Oxford Magazine:

  I have often heard Lewis’s excursions into what has been called popular theology adversely commented upon, and sometimes even with the suggestion that he was neglecting his proper business. I will express no opinion upon these activities, but I will insist that this book is not only a triumphant refutation of the view that they have been a mere distraction, but a triumphant justification of the interests and studies that have lain behind them.8

  Sir Winston Churchill obviously did not think Jack had been neglecting his proper business. In the King’s Honours List of 1951 he offered Jack a CBE.9 It was Warren who wrote of the reason for Jack’s refusal of this high honour. He said, “Jack felt obliged to refuse this: his appearance in a Conservative Honours List might, he felt, strengthen the ill-founded case of those who identified religious writing with anti-leftist propaganda.”10

  By August 1951, when Jack was holidaying again at the Crawfordsburn Inn, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had been published, and he had finished writing Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. The Magician’s Nephew had already been started. He, who had spoken of the coming arctic wind of old age, was finding instead that God had given him a breath of spring. When certain central features of his life had come to an end, this was a time of new beginnings. God never ends with an end, of course; He always ends with a beginning. The following year was to bring Jack the sort of beginning that any confirmed bachelor would have laughed off.

  Chapter Sixteen

  NO LONGER FACELESS

  SEPTEMBER 1952 WAS REVEALING A post-harvest England. As the pearly-grey morning mists lifted, they revealed the tiny flowers on the margins of the stubbled fields. These little flowers—the mayweed, pimpernel, charlock, bindweed, and the field forget-me-not—were flourishing now that the harvest had been cleared. In the meadows, some plants were still prominent: hardheads, agrimony, false fox sedge, and bristly ox-tongue.

  In the now fast-receding summer, children could be found wandering along the hedges with half-filled baskets and purple-stained mouths. Few of them could resist the temptation to eat the blackberries rather than gather them. Thousands upon thousands of bushes carried the succulent fruit.

  As the September days shortened, all kinds of birds were busy. The sweet little song of the swallow was soothing and healing to minds and hearts. Flocks of skylarks, hedge sparrows, starlings, and linnets circled the fields and hedgerows, dropping in a body as soon as anything worth eating was spotted. It did not take much to alarm them; suddenly, on being disturbed, they would rise up as a cloud only to sink down again at a safer end of the stubble-filled field.

  On 24 September 1952, an Anglophile from New York arrived at Jack’s Magdalen College rooms. She was to bring Jack an incredible amount of love and happiness. He admitted that what he thought he would have had in his twenties he had in his sixties. Even to his own surprise, he was going to fall in love.

  I have long wondered what she was really like. I have stayed at her son’s house and talked to him about his relationship with Jack. I have also discussed with him the love story that developed between his mother and Jack. In his home I have looked at her photograph looking at me, and have pondered on her personality. Deborah Winger, of course, gave the famous interpretation of her personality in the film Shadowlands. Claire Bloom has attempted the interpretation on stage; but to understand her personality more deeply, one needs to understand her roots and history.

  Joy Gresham was born Joy Davidman in New York City on 18 April 1915. Her Jewish parents came from Eastern Europe. Her father, Joseph Isaac Davidman, was born in Poland in 1887 and immigrated to New York in 1893. Her mother, Jeanette Davidman, came from the Ukraine. Joy’s parents had abandoned their Jewish faith; but, because of conversations she had with her mother as she grew up, its legacy remained long in Joy’s mind. Her mother would tell her in detail of Jewish-Ukrainian village life; one imagines it to be similar to the film Fiddler on the Roof.

  Joy took a B.A. at Hunter College, New York in 1934, and an M.A. in English Literature at Columbia University in 1935, when she was just twenty. For a few years she taught English in various high schools in New York. She has left the following record of her early thinking:

  In 1929 I believed in nothing but American prosperity; in 1930 I believed in nothing. Men, I said, are only apes. Virtue is only custom. Life is only an electrochemical reaction. Mind is only a set of conditioned reflexes, and anyway most people aren’t rational like me. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy was only.1

  The atheistic Joy lived in New York at a grim time in the life of the nation. Following the Wall Street Crash, depression was gripping the United States. In an unprecedented wave of panic, fear, and confusion, thirteen million shares changed hands on the New York Stock Exchange in one day, 24 October 1929. As Joy saw hungry men selling apples on the street corners of New York, she felt she could not be indifferent to the needs of others. She decided to join the Communist Party. The Party sent her to work on their magazine New Masses. Her talent as a poet was recognised when her book of free verse, Letter to a Comrade, was published. It won the Yale Younger Poets award for 1938. Encouraged, Joy left school-teaching and spent six months as a junior scriptwriter for MGM in Hollywood.

  In 1940, Joy Davidman’s novel Anya was published, and it showed the evidence of those avid conversations with her mother before the Second World War.

  In Britain, we have the wonderful Rabbi Mark stories by David Kossoff, which describe Jewish life in Poland before the First World War. They are jewels of wisdom, sparkling with Jewish humour. I have never heard anyone equal David Kossoff’s gift for public story telling.

  Joy’s novel about Ukrainian-Jewish village life tells the story of a shopkeeper’s daughter who, in her search for free love, rebels against the narrow strictures of her Jewish upbringing. Since Joy was a woman wh
o never had to follow those strictures in her youth, the novel says a lot about the depth of those mother-daughter conversations.

  While editing a volume of anti-imperialist war poetry, War Poems of the United Nations, Joy met William Lindsay (Bill) Gresham. Six years older than Joy, Bill Gresham was already divorced and had gone to “fight” in the Spanish Civil War. He had returned mentally ill, survived an attempt at suicide, and had joined the Communist Party. Psychoanalysis treatment had helped his illness, and when Joy met him he was editor of a fiction magazine. The two were married in August 1942. Bill then worked as a freelance writer. He was an alcoholic. Their two boys, David and Douglas, were born in 1944 and 1945. They moved to Ossining, New York in 1946, by which time Bill was having an extra-marital affair, and his mental illness had returned with a vengeance. Both Joy and Bill had gotten help through Jack’s publications; and both had professed faith in Christ in 1948. They also joined a local Presbyterian Church in Ossining. Joy eventually persuaded Bill to buy a farm in Staatsburg, New York, and he did with the proceeds based on the film of his thriller novel, Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power.

  In the latter part of 1949, Joy came across her friend Chad Walsh’s book C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Sceptics. Chad Walsh was a gifted poet and teacher, and eventually became Professor of English at Beloit College, Wisconsin. He met C. S. Lewis during the summer of 1948, and his book was the first to be written about Jack. It is still highly acclaimed. He was also ordained in the Episcopal Church, and served as an assistant at St. Paul’s Church, Beliot, from 1948 to 1977. Joy talked with Chad about Jack and how she would like to know the answer to some of the points he raised. She could not have talked to a better man in America on the subject of Jack; Chad suggested that she write to him. In 1949, Joy also attended one or two lectures in New York by a friend of hers, a Roman Catholic priest named Victor White. The lectures were on the relationship between psychology and religion. Joy got into a discussion about C. S. Lewis with the lecturer, and he also advised her to write to Lewis.