The Inklings

by Humphrey Carpenter

  At Cambridge, Lewis marked his arrival with an inaugural lecture. Discussing his new title as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature, he told his audience that ‘the great divide’ was not between those two supposed periods of history but somewhere between the early nineteenth century and the present day, between (as he believed) the greater part of civilised history and what he regarded as the ‘post-Christian’ mechanised society of the present day. ‘That,’ he declared, ‘really is the greatest change in the history of Western Man.’ He also alleged that there were still alive some specimens of the ‘Old Western Culture’ that had existed before this change, and that he himself was one such specimen. ‘I read as a native texts that you must read as foreigners,’ he told his audience. ‘Where I fail as a critic, I may yet be useful as a specimen. I would even dare to go further. Speaking not only for myself but for all other Old Western men whom you may meet, I would say, use your specimens while you can. There are not going to be many more dinosaurs.’

  In the summer of 1955 Joy Gresham (or Joy Davidman as she preferred to be known) moved to Oxford. She rented a house not far from the Kilns, in the Old High Street of Headington, and she began to see Lewis almost every day. Some time later, Warnie Lewis remarked in his diary: ‘It was obvious what was going to happen.’

  Yet the progress of the friendship was not without its difficulties. Warnie, who was certainly a little jealous of Joy’s invasion of his brother’s life, may have warned Jack about what he supposed to be her intentions, which (he remarked in his diary) ‘were obvious from the outset’. Certainly there were stories of Lewis hiding upstairs and pretending to be out when he saw her coming up the drive. It was perhaps a case such as he described in The Four Loves: ‘What is offered as Friendship on one side may be mistaken for Eros on the other, with painful and embarrassing results.’ But if so, his feelings had apparently changed by the spring of 1956.

  Early in that year the Home Office refused to renew Joy’s permit to stay in Great Britain. With a home established and a school found for the boys, she was appalled at the prospect of having to return to America. There was, however, one method of securing her right to remain, and on 23 April 1956 she was married at the Oxford registry office to C. S. Lewis.

  Two days after the ceremony, Lewis told Roger Lancelyn Green that the marriage was ‘a pure matter of friendship and expediency’. Warnie wrote in his diary: ‘J. assured me that Joy would continue to occupy her house as “Mrs Gresham”, and that the marriage was a pure formality designed to give Joy the right to go on living in England.’ Moreover, the marriage was largely kept secret – or at least was simply not mentioned to Lewis’s friends, apart from Barfield.

  Lewis had in no way compromised his principles. In his wartime broadcasts he had made the distinction between a purely civil marriage and the sacrament of the Church. ‘There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage,’ he had said: ‘one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not.’ Clearly he now believed that he and Joy were not married in a Christian sense.

  But it was not so simple. When Joy’s sons were home for the holidays, Lewis could only manage to see much of her by spending long evenings at her house, often not leaving until a late hour; and Joy pointed out to him that her reputation with the neighbours was suffering as a result. Meanwhile he was no longer being so secretive about the marriage, and began to speak about it to one or two of his friends. He and Joy even discussed the possibility of her moving to the Kilns, for apart from other considerations she was suffering from acute rheumatism in the hip and would be glad of help with keeping house. Arrangements were made for the move. Then the rheumatism grew worse and she had to go into hospital for treatment. In hospital it was discovered that she was suffering from bone cancer.

  ‘No one can mark the exact moment at which friendship becomes love,’ Lewis wrote to one of his regular correspondents shortly after he had heard this news. In some ways he did not want to love this woman who was so near to death. He once said: ‘“Don’t put your goods in a leaky vessel. Don’t spend too much on a house you may be turned out of” – there is no man alive who responds more naturally than I to such canny maxims. I am a safety-first creature. Of all arguments against love none makes so strong an appeal to my nature as “Careful! This might lead you to suffering!”’ Yet the days of talking about the marriage as a mere expediency were over, and Lewis and Joy determined that they must be married in the eyes of the Church. Warnie too had been won over. ‘Never have I loved her more than since she was struck down,’ he wrote in November 1956, shortly after the cancer had been diagnosed. ‘Her pluck and cheerfulness are beyond priase, and she talks of the disease and its fluctuations as if she was describing the experiences of a friend of hers. God grant that she may recover.’

  A church marriage was not so easy to arrange: Joy was, after all, divorced, and the Church of England, to which Lewis belonged, did not normally sanction remarriage. Official permission was refused. But Lewis had felt for many years that Christ’s teachings seemed to forbid remarriage only to a guilty party in a divorce where adultery was concerned, and not to an innocent person.1 And in Smoke on the Mountain Joy Davidman declared: ‘There are marriages which God puts asunder, cases of danger to body and soul, cases where children must be saved at all costs, from a destructive parent.’ She implied that in such cases remarriage should be allowed. A priest was found who shared these views – he was a former pupil of Lewis’s – and on 21 March 1957 he celebrated their marriage at Joy’s bedside in hospital.

  ‘One of the most painful days of my life,’ Warnie wrote in his diary after the ceremony. ‘At 11 a.m. we all gathered in Joy’s room, and the marriage was celebrated. I found it heartrending, and especially Joy’s eagerness for the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J.’ One reason for the ecclesiastical ceremony was that she did not want to die in hospital, and Lewis wished her to be married to him in the sight of God before he brought her home. ‘She is to be moved here next week,’ Warnie added, ‘and will sleep in the common-room, with a resident hospital nurse installed. Sentence of death has been passed, and the end is only a matter of time.’

  The priest who conducted the marriage ceremony also laid hands on Joy and prayed for her recovery. Lewis recorded Joy’s physical state at this time: one femur was eaten through and the hip was partially destroyed, and the cancer had spread to her other leg and to the shoulder. She was moved to the Kilns. A few weeks later Lewis told Roger Lancelyn Green that, though her case was still considered to be terminal, she was sleeping well and had no pain. Moreover the cancerous spots in the bones had ceased to multiply. A little later, the existing spots were found to be healing, as was the fracture in the femur. In September 1957 she was able to move about in an invalid chair. By December she could walk with the aid of a stick, limping badly but otherwise quite strong. In the summer of 1958 she wrote to a friend, ‘My case is definitely arrested for the time being.’

  Lewis had never doubted the possibility of healing by faith, but he was also aware that the cure might have been the result of radiotherapy or hormone treatment. Only rarely did he use the word ‘miraculous’ when talking about Joy’s recovery. But Warnie was in no doubt. ‘Joy is busy in the kitchen cooking our dinner,’ he wrote in his diary in November 1958. ‘A recovery which was in the truest sense a miracle – admitted to be such by the doctors.’

  And so it was that Jack Lewis could begin something he had never contemplated: a marriage, founded on love. At this time he was at work on a series of recorded lectures for America, which he later revised as The Four Loves. Writing about Eros or romantic love, he looked back to what he had said in The Allegory of Love in 1936, and remarked: ‘Years ago when I wrote about medieval love-poetry and described its strange, half make-believe, “religion o
f love”, I was blind enough to treat this as an almost purely literary phenomenon. I know better now.’

  *

  At the Kilns, Joy organised redecorations and renovations, which were certainly badly needed (‘We were afraid to move the bookcases,’ Lewis said, ‘in case the walls fell down’). She managed to do a little digging in the garden, and she took to shooting pigeons in the wood, as well as firing a starting pistol to drive off trespassers, for she was certainly a determined woman. Lewis told his friends about these and other domestic incidents with great glee. He also gave a series of lunch parties in Magdalen so that they could meet her, for the marriage was now public knowledge. He made it clear to his friends how much the marriage meant to him. Walking across the quadrangle with Nevill Coghill and Peter Bayley he said, ‘Do you know, I am experiencing what I thought would never be mine. I never thought I would have in my sixties the happiness that passed me by in my twenties.’1

  His friends, however, responded with something a little less than enthusiasm. They could see that Joy was witty and clever; but several of them also thought that there was something ‘hard’ about her. Moreover, Lewis (as it were) thrust her forward at them, almost demanding that they should like her. He, who had expected his men friends to leave their own marriages entirely on one side when they came to the Inklings, now assumed that they would all accept her as an equal without a moment’s questioning.

  He did not help matters by overpraising her, rather as he had overpraised Charles Williams. He spoke of her almost as if she were an angelic being; whereas in their sight she looked, it had to be admitted, physically unattractive. And to those who knew something of her background she seemed to represent everything that Lewis had strenuously opposed: she had been a Communist, she wrote vers libre, she had published a novel somewhat in the style of D. H. Lawrence, and she was that thing which Lewis had always attacked, a voluble woman. She was also, which did not recommend her to the more insular among them, American and Jewish. Had Charles Williams been there to observe, he would undoubtedly have remarked with delight that in choosing a wife for Lewis the Omnipotence had displayed its ‘usual neat sardonic touch’. But to Tolkien the marriage seemed ‘very strange’.

  Tolkien, like many of Lewis’s friends, had not heard of the marriage until some time after it took place. When he did learn of it, probably at second hand rather than from Lewis himself, he was profoundly injured by the fact that Lewis had concealed it from him. He was also distressed by the fact that Lewis had married a divorcee, for his own views on divorce and remarriage were much less liberal than Lewis’s. In his eyes, Joy was still Mrs Gresham. But there was, perhaps, some other and deeper reason why he resented it. His friend Robert Murray noticed that when he talked about Lewis and the marriage it seemed almost as if he felt that some deep tie of friendship had been betrayed by it.

  There was of course somebody else who might have responded to the marriage with the same resentment and even hostility that Tolkien showed. No one had been closer to Lewis or depended on his company so much as his brother Warnie. And indeed when it first became apparent that Joy’s recovery would make it possible for her to establish a married life at the Kilns with Jack, Warnie’s reactions were as might be expected. ‘For almost twenty years,’ he wrote, ‘I had lived under a matriarchy at the Kilns. Then had followed a few years of unfettered male liberty. And now the Kilns was once more to have a mistress. Upon one thing my mind was absolutely made up, and that was that never again for any consideration would I submit to the domestic conditions which had prevailed under our ancien régime – and I sketched out provisional arrangements for an unobtrusive withdrawal from the home after the marriage, and the establishing of a home of my own in Eire. However, before I could even hint at my intention I discovered that it had never entered the heads of either Jack or Joy that I should do otherwise than continue to be one of the family at the Kilns; so obviously I had to give the new régime a trial before committing myself to my Irish plans. I found all my apprehensions permanently and swiftly dispelled. What Jack’s marriage meant to me was that our home was enriched and enlivened by the presence of a witty, broad-minded, well-read, tolerant Christian whom I had rarely heard equalled as a conversationalist and whose company was a never ending source of enjoyment. And to crown all, one who had a deep interest in and a considerable knowledge of the seventeenth century, my own pet hobby horse. Indeed at the peak of her apparent recovery she had already started work on a life of Madame de Maintenon.’

  Warnie was perhaps painting in this retrospective picture (it was written some years later) a rather rosier portrait of his feelings towards Joy and the marriage than was entirely the case at the time. One evening in March 1960, when Joy was away fetching one of the boys from school, he wrote laconically in his diary: ‘J. spent the evening with me in the study. With the exception of the 15 minute walk back from St Mary’s twice a month, this has been the only time I have spent with him since the end of March 1957 – just three years ago.’

  But if Warnie did enjoy less of Jack’s company than he would have wished, he had more than enough to occupy him, for between 1953 and 1962 he wrote and published six books on seventeenth-century France, books whose readability, wit and good sense almost equalled his brother’s work; Tolkien, despite his lack of interest in French history in general, read them avidly and much admired them.1 Warnie still indulged in bouts of heavy drinking, particularly during his annual holiday in Ireland; but this was probably as much the result of old habits as a reflection of his feelings about the marriage.

  *

  Was it, then, a ‘real’ marriage, or was Lewis merely imagining himself to be in love? Probably the question is meaningless, for there is usually some element of conscious choice in the business of ‘being in love’ – or so, at least, Lewis thought. ‘When we meet someone beautiful and clever and sympathetic,’ he wrote, ‘of course we ought, in one sense, to admire and love these good qualities. But is it not very largely in our own choice whether this love shall, or shall not, turn into what we call “being in love”?’

  On the other hand one can see much of Lewis’s life as a series of masks or postures which he adopted, consciously or unconsciously, as his way of dealing with the world. He himself was certainly aware that he had to penetrate many layers before he could discover his real feelings. He once wrote a poem on this subject, which he called ‘Posturing’:

  Because of endless pride

  Reborn with endless error,

  Each hour I look aside

  Upon my secret mirror

  Trying all postures there

  To make my image fair.

  The poem declared that only God’s shadow glimpsed in the mirror could bring about the death of this self-love, and the birth of a real Love. Ironically the poem itself was a posture, a pastiche of the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets.

  Indeed one can regard all Lewis’s most successful literary work as pastiche. He chose a form from one source, an idea from another; he played at being (in turns) Bunyan, Chesterton, Tolkien, Williams, anybody he liked and admired. He was an impersonator, a mimic, a fine actor; but what lay at the heart of it all? Who was the real C. S. Lewis?

  Again, the question is meaningless, or very nearly so. Lewis was what he was. Yet during this undeniably strange marriage which came at the close of his life, and which itself may have begun as yet another self-deception, there became visible what may have been a more ‘real’ Lewis than before. Certainly those who saw him at this period noticed a change in his manner. ‘He seemed very different,’ recalls Peter Bayley, ‘much more muted, much more gentle and much more relaxed. Even his voice seemed quieter.’

  Out of all this there came a book. It was written in 1955, and in many respects it was like Lewis’s other fiction, being both a myth retold and a story written didactically with relevance to Christianity. Yet there was also something very different about it.

  It was founded on the Cupid and Psyche myth, which had fascinated Le
wis since he first read it in Apuleius. But, though he derived the story from a classical source, he invented much that was entirely his own, most notably the central figure of the book. This is Orual, the king’s daughter and sister to Psyche. Plain looking, rather masculine in her agility, but deeply loving to those who earn her affection, Orual has been supposed by some readers to be in part a portrait of Joy Davidman. It may have been; but was it not also a self-portrait of Lewis? ‘There ought spiritually to be a man in every woman and a woman in every man,’ he had said; and in the character of Orual he perhaps found, at last, an expression of his whole nature. Like Orual with her veil, a veil which both protects her and is a source of her reputation among her people, his manner, all his postures, had brought him success but had also, perhaps, hidden his inner nature not merely from others but from himself. It was only when his marriage somehow removed that veil that he found his true nature.

  He wanted to call the book Bareface, but the publisher objected that this sounded like a Western; so he took a title from Orual’s words in the closing chapter: ‘Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over again, you’ll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?’