A Shiver of Wonder

by Derick Bingham

  In 1956, Joy was sent home to The Kilns to die. It was thought that she had only weeks to live; but little by little, she began to improve. She was able to walk in the house, then in the garden, and before long Jack was able to leave her in Warren’s care while he was in Cambridge. I find Joy to be an enigmatic woman, one of great intellectual ability. Perhaps the most moving and interesting tribute to her comes from Warren Lewis. In his affectionate and honouring Memoir of C. S. Lewis given in his introduction to Jack’s published letters, he comments that it was a delight to watch Jack and Joy together. He wrote, “For me Jack’s marriage meant that our home was enriched and enlivened by the presence of a witty, broad-minded, well-read, and tolerant Christian, whom I had rarely heard equalled as a conversationalist, and whose company was a never-ending source of enjoyment.”3

  At this time in Joy’s life, Jack suffered from osteoporosis. While he was losing calcium from his bones, Joy was gaining it in hers. He had prayed that God would allow him to take her pain, and he believed that this had happened. He was fitted with a surgical brace that supported his weakened spine, and he wore it for the rest of his life.

  Amazingly, all through this stressful time Jack’s pen flowed. He wrote a book called Reflections on the Psalms. By the New Year, Joy was redecorating The Kilns, cleaning and repainting. She was able to go out driving and was rushing about her home with a new zest for living. That zest encouraged them to have a belated honeymoon in County Down and County Donegal.

  It was Jack’s first flight in an aircraft when in July they flew to Belfast, the Professor terrified at the take-off, enchanted by his first above-the-clouds experience, and excited at the first glimpse of the Irish coastline. At the airport, they were met by the ever-faithful Arthur Greeves and driven to The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn, where they stayed for a fortnight. The Inn sits right on the edge of a wooded country park that sweeps down to the shores of Belfast Lough. Throughout the week they explored County Down and County Louth in Arthur’s car; and Jack gave a dinner at The Old Inn to introduce Joy to his relations. One wonders what Flora and Albert would have made of it all. Jack’s relatives took very well to Joy. After Crawfordsburn, they went to the Royal Fort Hotel in Rathmullan, County Donegal, and returned to Oxford, as Jack put it “drunk with blue mountains, yellow beaches, dark fuchsia, breaking waves, braying donkeys, peat-smell, and the heather just beginning to bloom.”4 The landscape of Narnia was still able to cast its spell.

  In 1957, Jack had been asked to make some recordings for the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation of Atlanta, Georgia. He chose as his subject the four loves, which he called Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity. His scripts were finished by the end of the summer of 1958, and Jack went to London to meet the founder of the American organisation, Mrs. Caroline Rakestraw, and to record his talks. They did not get on well. Mrs. Rakestraw tried to change his scripts and singularly failed. The organisation then began a significant advertising campaign, giving the impression that Jack would be in America to deliver the talks. However, when the Episcopalian Bishops on the board of the Foundation met, they decided that Jack’s talks were too frank for American audiences. Mrs. Rakestraw flew back to London to explain. The problem was, she said, that Jack had brought sex into his talk on eros. Jack wanted to know how he could talk about eros and leave it out!

  In the end, the recordings were offered to radio stations outside Mrs. Rakestraw’s network, though they were not widely broadcast. The actual recordings themselves fell far below the standard of Jack’s former BBC recordings. The honing skills of James Welch and his assistant, Eric Fern, were patently missing.

  In the Bible story of Samson, we learn that Samson ate honey out of the carcass of a dead lion. So often in Jack’s life, good things came out of unusual situations. The seemingly dead broadcasts eventually emerged as one of his best books. Jack had been given freedom to use the radio script as the basis for a book, The Four Loves. In the blurb of the book the Church Times commented, “He has never written better. Nearly every page scintillates with observations which are illuminating, provocative, and original.”5

  The book looks at affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis shows that the first three need the sweetening grace of charity, God’s love, which loves the unlovable. As for his dealing with sex, who could not be thankful for Lewis’s honesty that exposes a lustful man’s care for the pleasure of sex rather than the woman who gives it. Only a writer like Jack Lewis would illustrate such beastly behaviour by pointing out that the smoker does not keep the carton after he has smoked his cigarette. How much better is eros if it does not desire the Beloved herself but merely the pleasure she can give?

  Jack shows that, unredeemed, eros can be poisonous. I’ve never read a more powerful novel than Count Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. Considered by many to be the world’s greatest novel, it employs Tolstoy’s intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in literature. Jack uses this story to show how dangerous eros can be if not controlled. It certainly led Anna to abandon her child Seryozha and her husband Alexei for Count Vronsky. Tolstoy’s description of the fallen Anna, stealing back into her former home to see her son on his birthday, is a narrative of heartbreaking intensity. Her eventual suicide, chillingly and hauntingly described by Tolstoy like no other piece of literature I have ever encountered, shows where uncontrolled eros can lead.

  Jack shows that Affection, Friendship, and Eros all die or become demons, unless they obey God. No doubt, The Four Loves was deeply affected by his ever-deepening love for Joy. We must be thankful that the disappointment over the broadcasts on The Four Loves did not lead him to abandon his book.

  In September 1958, Jack’s book Reflections on the Psalms was published. It had been written in the autumn of 1957. Through his attendance at college chapel every morning, Jack came to know the Psalms almost by heart. He used the translation of the Psalms that is to be found in the Book of Common Prayer, the translation which was the work of Coverdale (1488-1568). Jack greatly admired the beauty and poetry of Coverdale’s translation. In his book on the Psalms, he addresses themes such as the cursings, judgment in the Psalms, death, connivance, nature, and the fair beauty of the Lord.6 He looks at how we ought to behave towards people in high positions who lie and behave abominably. With simplicity of style and at times undisguised wit, he confronts many of the knotty problems faced by any reader of the Psalms.

  Following the publication of his book on the Psalms, Jack received an invitation from the Archbishop of Canterbury to become a member of the Commission to Revise the Psalter. He accepted and joined the committee of seven men—one of whom was T. S. Eliot. They revised the translation of the Psalms in the Church of England’s Book of Common Prayer. The completed version of this committee’s work appeared in 1963 as The Revised Psalter.

  Christmas 1958 came with a virtual snowstorm of thousands of Christmas cards falling on The Kilns. Across the world the name of C. S. Lewis was being established in the minds and hearts of many readers whom Jack could never know personally. They sent him cards with a loving vengeance!

  Jack’s married life was now at its apex. Joy, David, Douglas, and Jack turned to a new year with a very contented home hearth. It was by no means quiet, though. The banter between Jack and Joy was good-humoured, but Joy’s occasional shooting of pigeons in the woods at The Kilns was not really to Jack’s liking. She ate them, too!

  Jack turned again to his work at Cambridge, lecturing twice a week giving a lecture titled “The Prolegomena to the Study of Our Earlier Poetry.” In June, Joy and he returned to Northern Ireland and The Old Inn at Crawfordsburn once more, and to a week in Rathmullan, County Donegal with Arthur Greeves. They went to Wales for a summer break with David and Douglas, and then Jack returned to Cambridge to begin his lectures, “English Literature 1300-1500.”

  On 13 October, Jack returned to Oxford to take his wife for a routine check-up at the Churchill Hospital. The results revealed that cancerous spots had returned in
many of her bones. It was deeply depressing news. Just when their marriage had reached a real depth of personal happiness for them both, suffering returned to fill their days with its pain and uncertainty.

  Joy now entered a course of radiotherapy; and Jack continued his busy schedule of lectures at Cambridge University, especially enjoying eight lectures on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. He saw Joy at weekends. How bittersweet his life must have been. He was still working on the edge of a precipice.

  Joy showed great courage and cheerfulness during her final illness. In April 1960, she and Jack travelled to Greece with their friends Roger and June Lancelyn Green. Joy was dying, but she was able to realise her greatest lifelong desire. She climbed up to the Acropolis in Athens, and sat with Jack on the steps of the Propylaea, enjoying the beauty of the Parthenon and Erechtheum. Under an azure sky, they feasted their eyes on the honey-gold columns of Ancient Greece. They went to Mycenae and the Lion Gate. The party drove down through vineyards, scented pinewoods, and olive groves to the head of the Gulf of Corinth, and explored the ruins at Aegosthena. They dined on octopus, fried red mullet, fried squid, ewes’ milk, cheese, fresh oranges, and they drank retsina in a little taverna right on the shores of the Gulf. They ate and talked by the lapping waves for several hours, surrounded by the hum of bees. Jack looked upon it as one of the greatest days of his life.7

  They flew to Rhodes and visited Lindos, and attended an Easter Service at the Orthodox Church. They flew to Crete and visited the Palace of Nimos at Knossos. Then they flew to Pisa in Italy, staying for a night before returning to London on 13 April. For a classical scholar like Jack Lewis, the trip to the places he had been reading about for fifty years must have been deeply inspirational. They both must have known that Joy’s life was ebbing, and therefore they relished the trip all the more.

  The bliss of Greece was soon exchanged for the misery of cancer. In May, it reappeared in Joy’s right breast, and after surgery she came back home to The Kilns. She could now get around only in a wheelchair; and, on Tuesday the fourteenth of June, Warren took her for what he thought was going to be her last outing. They went as far as the pond at The Kilns. On 20 June, she was taken to the Ackland Nursing Home, seemingly close to death, and Douglas was brought home from his school in Wales. But she recovered enough to return to The Kilns. On 3 July, she accompanied Jack to dinner at what was one of his favourite hotels, the Studley Priory; and the next day she went for a drive in the Cotswolds with her nurse.

  On 12 July, Jack and Joy were playing scrabble together before bed; but at six o’clock the next morning the household was wakened by Joy’s screaming. Jack called the doctor, and Joy was taken by ambulance to the Radcliffe Infirmary. Conscious to the last, Joy told the Chaplain that she was at peace with God. She died peacefully about 11.20 that evening.

  For Jack, Warren, Douglas, and David it must have been a sombre taxi ride on Monday 18 July to the crematorium. The Chaplain of Trinity College Oxford, Austin Farrer, conducted a Christian service there. Joy’s ashes were scattered at the Oxford Crematorium, and a marble plaque was erected, with Jack’s special epitaph for her:

  Here the whole world (stars, water, air,

  And field, and forest, as they were

  Reflected in a single mind)

  Like cast-off clothes was left behind

  In ashes yet with hope that she,

  In lenten lands, hereafter may

  Resume them on her Easter Day.

  There is a story told of Napoleon Bonaparte who, when approached by one of his officers to promote a soldier who had distinguished himself in battle, answered, “And what did he do the next day?”

  Napoleon would have been intrigued by what Jack Lewis did on the day following the death of his wife. Donald Swann (of Flanders and Swann Musicals fame) and his friend David Marsh had approached Jack with the idea of setting Jack’s book Perelandra as an opera. David had agreed to write the libretto and Donald the music. How did Jack feel about it? He responded positively; and on 14 July 1960 the three of them met at The Kilns for breakfast followed by a stroll around the garden, discussing the opera for about an hour. Jack then asked to be excused, pointing out that his wife had died the night before. Donald Swann was deeply impressed by Jack’s courtesy to them in such circumstances. The work was eventually produced and brought Jack real pleasure.

  During the month of August, Bill Gresham came to visit his boys and met with Jack several times. Bill eventually took cancer of the tongue and throat. Sadly, he died of an overdose of sleeping pills at the Dixie Hotel in New York City in September 1962.8

  Where to now for the bridegroom and widower? He turned again to that great solace in his life, writing. He poured his grief into ink, and out of that grief came an extraordinary book. In the month following Joy’s death, Jack wrote A Grief Observed. He did not initially set out to publish his writing about his grief, but in September he showed the manuscript to Roger Lancelyn Green and they discussed the possibility of publishing it. He wanted it to be of help to other grieving people. The manuscript was submitted to Faber, one of whose directors was the poet T. S. Eliot. Like multitudes of others, he found the work incredibly moving. In four short parts, Jack poignantly faced what his grief was doing to him. Here were the raw emotions of a man torn apart by bereavement with its doubts and fears. Jack tells honestly of how he went looking for God, but found the door slammed in his face, followed by silence.

  It is his most personal work, even more personal than Surprised by Joy; and it reveals the depths of his feelings for Joy Gresham. He rages at God as Job did. And, like Job, he slowly and eventually turns to the great Creator and begins to praise the One who had made his wife. The cries of agony in this work are potent, but there is healing in its lines, and a dawning understanding that grief is a process, and that it is useless to speculate about it. In the end, the best is perhaps what we least understand. In their despair, untold multitudes of grieving people have found A Grief Observed to be a source of inspiration and relief. There is not a platitude or a cliché to be found anywhere. The book may be a dissection of grief, but it leads on to the great truth of Christian hope. Just within these last few weeks, I have talked to two very different people, one an academic and one a comedienne, both living in Ulster, who found invaluable help in A Grief Observed.

  It is entirely understandable that Jack felt he could not publish this book under his own name. It was too personal, and it might embarrass his friends. Also, he was sure that it would bring mail that would overwhelm him. Imagine his surprise when the book was published under a pseudonym and he received copies from people who hoped it would help him in his grief! He said nothing about his authorship.

  A Grief Observed was published in 1961, under the pseudonym N. W. Clerk (“N. W.” was an abbreviation of Nat Whilk, Anglo-Saxon for “I not know whom”), but did not sell well until it was reissued in 1964 under Lewis’s own name.

  Is there a lesson in this pattern? I remember when as a young Christian, I was beginning to write for the cause of Christ’s kingdom. When I saw my name on the cover of my first book, I wondered at the propriety of it. Should I write anonymously? I went to see a wise friend, and he said, “Well, Paul did not have a problem with it, did he? He began all of his letters with his name.” Of course, what he said was true. Paul didn’t even wait until the end of his letters to declare his authorship! “Let your name stand for something,” my friend counselled.

  A Grief Observed published under the name of N. W. Clerk did not signify as much as it did when the world discovered it was actually C. S. Lewis observing grief. By God’s grace, his name and kindness had come to stand for something. C. S. Lewis’s name proves it is not true to say that no one is irreplaceable.

  Chapter Eighteen

  A SHIVER OF WONDER

  AUTUMN WAS JACK’S FAVOURITE SEASON. He called it the best of all seasons. He once wrote to a friend that he wasn’t sure if old age wasn’t the best part of life, except that, like autumn, it didn’t
last.

  In October 1960, the beeches of England were in their full October glory of gold, russet, and amber. Keats called autumn “the close-bosomed friend of the maturing sun.” He was right, for autumn sunshine is mellow. As the month passed, millions of leaves began to fall in masses of crimson and gold. In the meadows there were hoards of mushrooms and toadstools, and fungus growth had reached its peak. The violet-blue bloom of sloes was visible, as was the vivid scarlet provided by the guelder rose. The hawthorn bushes carried a multitude of crimson haws, and the wild roses were loaded with hips.

  Across England, the crab apple trees carried good crops of the little sour green or yellow apples. Boys could be seen throwing sticks into the horse chestnut trees to dislodge the fruit. Grey squirrels were scrambling around the bases of the hazel bushes in search of nuts, or out on the meadows collecting fallen acorns. On finding an acorn, they sat up on their haunches, holding the acorn in their forepaws and nibbling at it, and then popped it right into their mouths. They would then bound towards the base of a nearby hedge, looking for a suitable spot to dig a hole, bury the acorn, cover it, and then pat the earth down flat. Any acorns that they did not dig up in the coming winter would reappear the next year as seedlings of the mighty oak.

  During autumn, there was one little song that started the day and rang out again after dusk had fallen. It was the silvery trill and warble of the home-keeping English robin.

  There is a phenomenon in British weather that is one of the most fascinating features of its climate. It is called the Indian Summer. It is a period of dry, warm weather that sometimes occurs in late autumn. It consists of mild, sunny, misty days that are more like the first warm days of early spring than they are like days of autumn.

  Jack Lewis was in the autumn of his significant life; but he was enjoying an Indian Summer, bursting with activity. On 6 October 1960, he travelled from Cambridge to London and spent the night at the Athenaeum Club on Pall Mall. The Athenaeum is a club for individuals who are known for their scientific, literary, or aristocratic associations, and it has had a long association with Anglican dignitaries. Anthony Trollope worked on his novels at the Club; and Jack must have felt at home as he walked through the entrance, with the Club’s cipher bearing the Greek letters Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta within a mosaic wreath on the floor. Nearby, there stood a classical statue of Apollo. Jack had his mind on something more important than the literature of Greece, though. Next morning, he went to Lambeth Palace to attend a committee on the revision of the Psalms. He enjoyed this work and also the stimulating conversation with the committee members.