Jack began his twice-weekly lectures “English Literature between 1300 and 1500” at Cambridge University. Even at the time he was writing A Grief Observed, he was also working on a short book which was to prove to be an outstanding work of literary criticism. In a nutshell, the book described the problem of how literary critics can come between readers and good books. Jack felt that literature exists for the joy of the reader, and that, in reading great literature the reader should transcend himself, for he was never more himself than when he did this. He maintained that English literature was not primarily an academic subject. Jack wanted to preserve the main experience of the reader as being above education.
When Jack was asked to comment on undergraduate criticism published in the little Cambridge Broadsheet, he did not equivocate. He showed how criticism from undergraduates is but an imitation of their elders. In October 1960, in a Cambridge undergraduate literary magazine called Delta, the undergraduates responded with vengeance, bad manners, and bitterness in heavy measure. Jack’s assertion that most English literature was composed for adult readers who knew the Bible and the classics, had added fuel to their flame.
The controversy spread to the Cambridge University newspaper Variety, and thence to The Listener, The Times Literary Supplement, and The Spectator. Professor F. R. Leavis took the undergraduates’ side. If ever a man had put his head above the parapet, Jack Lewis was that man. Despite a heart breaking from grief, his passion for literature and for introducing others to its joys remained undiminished. Defiantly and brilliantly, he defended the “castle of literature” for the reader, against the critic.
The New Year saw Jack hard at work on a new twice-weekly series of lectures on Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene. The booming voice, the mirth in his eyes, the passion for his subject, the carefully chosen illustrations, the gifted articulation that had gripped many English Literature undergraduates at Oxford, now gripped the undergraduates at Cambridge. Work also continued on the Commission to Revise the Psalter. On 23 February, Jack gave a memorable talk on Samuel Pepys at Magdalene College at the annual dinner to celebrate Pepys’ birthday. Jack was also collecting and revising his poems, with a view to having them published.
In his Life of C. S. Lewis, Walter Hooper highlights a very poignant piece of writing from Jack that arrived on the desk of Jocelyn Gibb, the Managing Director of Jeffrey Bles (the firm that was publishing the Narnian stories). Jocelyn had been greatly used to encourage Jack in his writing. Jack had been working on a collection of essays for publication, and had written a new passage for transposition to his book. The passage was a sermon he had preached on 28 May at Mansfield College, the youngest and smallest of Oxford’s thirty-nine colleges. It was about heaven, a subject that always brought the best out of Jack.1
It is hard now to realise that it was only by an Act of Parliament in 1871 that the educational and social opportunities offered by Britain’s premier institutions were made available to all Non-conformists. To his eternal credit, it was the British Prime Minister W. E. Gladstone who first recommended that a Non-conformist college be founded at Oxford. Mansfield College moved from Birmingham to Oxford in 1886. The College occupies one of the most attractive sites in Oxford; and its beautiful chapel is a fine setting for any sermon on Heaven. Jack’s sermon tackled the problem we all have in thinking of Heaven in negative terms: no food, no events, no time, no art, etc.
Jack created a fable in which he imagined a boy being brought up by his mother in a dungeon. All the boy knows of the outside world are the pictures of it that his mother draws for him. Suddenly, the mother realises that her child thinks the real world is full of lines drawn in lead pencil. When he is told it isn’t, his whole notion of the world outside his dungeon becomes a blank. Jack said that it is so with our concept of heaven. The “pencil lines” of our experience will vanish in the real landscape of resurrection life. The candlelight of our experience will become invisible when the window blind is pulled up and the risen sun blazes in. Jack believed that history shows that the Christians who did most for this present world were those who thought most of the next one. Little did he realise how significantly he was one of those Christians. Heaven was no bribe for him any more than a man’s love for a woman is mercenary because he wants to marry her. Love seeks to enjoy its object; and he was looking forward to seeing God. For those who did not want God, there was Hell. That was the place where God left you if you didn’t want Him. For Jack, though, his great goal of seeing God was nearer than he thought.
Somehow, for me, the stage I have now reached in this biography is the most difficult part to write. Here was a man who, as we have just seen, was at the very height of his writing powers. After all the pains and pleasures, the joys and sorrows of his long pilgrimage, he had come now to a point where he was matured and full of wisdom from life’s varied experiences. His inability as a child to hold scissors and create a castle from cardboard had led Jack to hold a pen and from his informed mind, awesomely, to create much more than castles. He had almost become a household name in the English-speaking world. His fame had not affected his humanity in the slightest, as his letters patently show. This fact is demonstrated particularly in the book published in 1967 by Wm. B. Eerdmans entitled Letters to an American Lady. In 1950, Jack had begun a correspondence with an American lady whom he would never meet. These letters reveal the generous and compassionate side of his nature. Over the last thirteen years of his life, he patiently offered encouragement and guidance to another human being in the day-to-day joys and sorrows of life. Life’s impermanence, as well as the fact that here we have no abiding city, was now about to be demonstrated in Jack’s own experience. His dear friend Arthur Greeves, with whom he had a glorious reunion in Oxford in late June 1961, noted that Jack looked very ill. Sadly, it was all too true.
After Arthur had gone home to Belfast, Jack went to see his own doctor and friend Robert Harvard, who diagnosed an enlarged prostate gland. His surgeon eventually decided that Jack was not fit enough to withstand an operation. His kidneys were infected, and he was suffering from toxemia. His heart had also been affected, and he was experiencing cardiac irregularities. At this stage, he had to sleep upright in a chair at night. He was unable to go back to Cambridge for the Michaelmas Term of 1961, and stayed at home with Warren, David, and Douglas. He also began having a series of blood transfusions at the Ackland Nursing Home. These treatments led to a gradual and continuing improvement in his condition between June 1962 and July 1963.
During his illness, Jack’s friends were a great source of help and encouragement to him. Quite a few of them visited him at The Kilns. On Mondays he still went to The Eagle and Child, and often on to The Trout at Godstow for lunch. On Wednesday mornings he took communion with his local parish minister, Ronald Head, at The Kilns. He began to re-read some of his favourite books, including Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Merton’s No Man is an Island, Wordsworth’s The Prelude, Ruskin’s Praeterila and Modern Painters. He also read the Odyssey and Iliad in Greek, and the Aeneid in Latin. He read again works by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, Sir Walter Scott, and George Herbert. As ever, his pen kept flowing. He began to write the book “behind” his lecture series “The Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Literature.” It was published in 1964 as The Discarded Image. The review in the Times Literary Supplement of 10 July 1964 said that the book “represents Lewis the expositor at his best, and communicates the zest that he brought to the study of literature, philosophy and religion alike.”
The zest for the things that he cared for never left Jack. Sometimes, the impression is given that as he came towards the end of his life he was filled with doubt, and that his once-surging faith had diminished. The claim simply is not true.
In April 1962, Jack returned to Cambridge University to resume his twice-weekly lectures on The Faerie Queene. Jack’s friend George Sayer tells of taking him on that return journey to Cambridge, and stopping at the Woburn Estate. They slipped in through a little gate
into the woods. As Jack sat in a glade watching the small deer, he told George that when he was writing the Narnia stories he had never imagined anything as lovely.2 Next time they stopped at Woburn though, the deer were gone, and the entrancing beauty had passed.
In the summer of 1962, Jack finished his book The Discarded Image, and was given an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Dijon. Jack now had quiet, peaceful days; but they were shattered in September by the suicide of Bill Gresham. It caused Jack great pain to have to pass on the sad news to Douglas and David.
Jack returned to Cambridge in October to resume his lectures, “English Literature 1300-1500.” They were to be his last. In November, Tolkien invited him to a special dinner in connection with his seventieth birthday, but Jack did not feel able to attend because of the restrictions his illness had put upon him. Tolkien and Lewis corresponded that Christmas, the old love and respect for each other as deep as ever. Tolkien visited Jack twice in 1962 and 1963.
For some time Jack had wanted to write a book on prayer, but it had not worked out. He made an attempt, but it had faltered because he had not found a suitable genre in which to express his thinking. He finally abandoned the work until early in 1963, when the idea came to him to write about prayer in an imaginary series of letters to a friend. Unbeknownst to Jack, it was to be his last book. It was called Letters to Malcolm.3 It is touching that the last of his twenty-two letters finishes on the great Bible quotation regarding the future state of the believer beyond death: For we know that we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.4
The New Year brought Jack yet another honorary doctorate, this time from the University of Lyon. He continued his work at Cambridge, and before Easter he contacted Arthur Greeves about another visit home. Arthur felt that a visit to Donegal would be too exhausting, so they decided to go somewhere along the North Coast of Northern Ireland. It was to be back to those wide, pale skies of his childhood at Castlerock. Jack decided to take Douglas with him to help carry his luggage. He was really looking forward to the trip, well aware that it could be his last.
If I were a film director and filming the life of C. S. Lewis, towards the end I would roll my cameras across the lawn and garden of a beautiful English country home in Cirencester, set in June 1963. The occasion to be enacted would be the first performance of the opera in three acts of Jack’s Perelandra. Six years after that first performance, after it had been performed in New York on 2 November 1969, the New Yorker published a review: “It is a genuine opera, with a very serious plot, and it is full of arias and has a deft score. . . . The idiom of the music is, as most progressive composers would say, ‘not of our time.’ It is unabashedly old-fashioned. It represents the Handel-Mendelssohn tradition, which is the tradition of most unselfconscious British Music” (6 December 1969).
Not of our time? At the opera’s heart there were things that are eternal. In fact, to be relevant we need to say things that are eternal. Singing at the piano with others at that first performance was Donald Swann. Donald had pursued a life-long quest of religious faith and doubt. As a student at Christ Church Oxford, he had written serious settings of the works of poets such as Pushkin, Froissart, and Ronsard.
The man seeking faith but plagued with doubt had found something in the writing of C. S. Lewis that touched him. Listening to Donald singing, that same C. S. Lewis, “apostle to the sceptics,” has tears flowing down his cheeks. He is moved by what Donald Swann and David Marsh have done with his work. The performance is like a microcosm of Jack’s ministry, reaching to “the man on the outside.”
Sixteen days later, on the very day he was to have left for his holiday in Northern Ireland, Jack had a heart attack and went into a coma. The next day he regained consciousness and eventually was sent home to The Kilns on 6 August. He had a male nurse called Alec Ross who cared for him, as well as Mrs. Maude Millar the housekeeper and his newly appointed secretary, Walter Hooper. The faithful Paxford, too, was still looking after The Kilns.
Where was Warren? Jack had received a note from the hospital of Our Lady of Lourdes in Drogheda, to say that they had taken him in. His drinking problem was as severe as ever. George Sayer volunteered to go to Ireland and find out the situation. When he got there, the medical authorities told him that Warren was not fit to travel at present, and they undertook to break the news of Jack’s condition to him gently. Warren was able to return to the Kilns in September. As the end of Jack’s life drew near, he and Warren became close once more.
Tolkien and his son Christopher visited Jack for the last time in the autumn of 1963; and the old passionate love of literature was as deep as ever between these two giants. They talked of Sir Thomas Malory’s fifteenth-century Le Morte d’ Arthur, which contains timeless champions of the helpless, and assumes the recognition of a loftier standard of justice, purity, and unselfishness than was known in its own century. The book exudes knightly honour, courtly love, and chivalric duty. Did they discuss how the legend tells of King Arthur being taken away on a boat as he was dying? Would it not have been priceless to hear them have their last conversation? They talked for an hour.
On 14 October 1963, Jack’s retirement was announced in the Times.
Professor C. S. Lewis has resigned, because of ill health, his appointment as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, and his Fellowship at Magdalene College. . . . He said he could be driven in a car, but he could not walk more than a short distance, and was unable to climb stairs. “It could be very much worse; at least it does not hurt like toothache,” he said. . . . He is now correcting the proofs of The Discarded Image—”A sort of background to medieval literature,” he said. “I always have a hundred major projects in mind. It is nice to have leisure, and I may be able to get down to all those books I have never written.”
“All those books I have never written”? It was not an idle mind that was approaching death, but a richly fertile one. Who knows what further works of inspiration would have flowed from his heart and mind if he had lived? But God had other plans for Jack. As he faced the prospect of death, he told his brother that he had done all he wanted to do, and that he was ready to go. This statement showed great contentment and peace of mind; but if he were to live he clearly did not intend to be idle.
As 22 November 1963 dawned, it was a day to be remembered across the world. On that day Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly lifted a high-powered rifle and shot President John F. Kennedy from a window in the Texas School Book Depository. Annually, two million people visit Dealy Plaza, which the President rode along on that fateful day. That slaying was a defining moment in my teenage years; and like hundreds of millions of others I can remember where I was when I heard about it. Etched into our minds are the rider-less horse in the President’s funeral possession, the salute of his little son, John John, and the black veil across Jacqueline Kennedy’s face. John F. Kennedy had hardly passed his first one thousand days in office. Naturally, the death of this President of Irish descent occupied the minds of the world on that horrendous day.
The Professor of Irish descent arose that morning and had his breakfast. He then attended to his letters and worked on the day’s crossword puzzle. After lunch, he fell asleep in his chair, and Warren suggested that he would be more comfortable in his bed. He agreed, and at 4.00 p.m., in a timeworn tradition, Warren took him a cup of tea. They had a few words together, and Warren left him drowsy but comfortable.
At 5.30 p.m. Warren heard a crash and ran to the room to find Jack lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. Three or four minutes later he left this Shadowlands to meet The Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the King of all kings and the Lord of all lords.
On 26 November 1963, a cold but sunlit day, his funeral was held at his parish church, Holy Trinity, Headington. His close friends gathered for the service. Amongst them were Lady Dunbar, née Maureen Moore, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, Dr. Harvard, Miss Wakeham, the President and Vice-President of Magdalen College and Inklings, J. H. Dundas-Grant, Owen Barfi
eld, A. C. Harwood, George Sayer, and Austin Farrer. There, too, was the faithful Paxford. Warren had the words “Men must endure their going hence” cut into Jack’s tombstone; they were the words to be found on the Shakespeare Calendar the day their mother died.
Never have I found a book so hard to finish. Where can one finally lay down his pen on such a mind and life? As we part, my reader, would you allow me one more musing? If you have stayed with me this length of time, you will be aware that I have been trying to show the deep influence that Ulster had upon C. S. Lewis. It is to this Province that I now wish to return and refer to something once said to me by a man who lives here. He’d worked for a pharmacist and had not gone to the pharmacist’s funeral. Here is the story:
One of the leading pharmacists in an Ulster town,
He was the conduit of suffering.
Colds, flu, ulcers, earaches, headaches,
Sore throats, upset stomachs, upset-most-things,
Found ease and even cures through his hands,
And he was generous and kind.
Even those who could not afford their prescriptions
A Shiver of Wonder Page 20