C. S. Lewis: A Biography

C.S. Lewis

A Biography

A.N. Wilson

For Ruth

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

PREFACE – THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

ONE – ANTECEDENTS

TWO – EARLY DAYS 1898–1905

THREE – LITTLE LEA 1905–1908

FOUR – SCHOOLS 1908–1914

FIVE – THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917

SIX – THE ANGEL OF PAIN 1917–1918

SEVEN – UNDERGRADUATE 1919–1922

EIGHT – HEAVY LEWIS 1922–1925

NINE – REDEMPTION BY PARRICIDE 1925–1929

TEN – MYTHOPOEIA 1929–1931

ELEVEN – REGRESS 1931–1936

TWELVE – THE INKLINGS 1936–1939

THIRTEEN – SCREWTAPE 1939–1942

FOURTEEN – SEPARATIONS 1942–1945

FIFTEEN – NARNIA 1945–1951

SIXTEEN – THE SILVER CHAIR 1951–1954

SEVENTEEN – SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN 1954–1957

EIGHTEEN – MARRIAGE 1957–1959

NINETEEN – MEN MUST ENDURE 1959–1960

TWENTY – LAST YEARS 1960–1963

TWENTY-ONE – FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPY

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Sources

Praise

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

–PREFACE– THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

A child pushed open the door of the wardrobe so as to hide in it. It was, however, no ordinary wardrobe. It was hung with fur coats. The child pressed on further through the dark recesses of the cupboard, pushing aside the soft folds of fur and discovering beyond them a new world. What crunched beneath the feet was not mothballs but snow. Lucy had discovered Narnia.

Millions of readers throughout the world have been thrilled by this moment in C. S. Lewis’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and have gone on to read the six other stories which he wrote about that other world behind the wardrobe, the world of Narnia. The powerfulness of the stories derives in part from the immediacy of Lewis’s rough-hewn style, but more, surely, from the fact that this image touches something so very deep in so many people.

‘If everything on earth were rational,’ someone remarks in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, ‘nothing would happen.’ Nothing much would appear to have happened in the life of C. S. Lewis, who for his entire adult life was a scholar and teacher at Oxford and Cambridge in England. He did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people. His days were filled with writing and reading and domestic chores. And yet books about him continue to pour from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic.

This phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that his writings, while being self-consciously and deliberately at variance with the twentieth century, are paradoxically in tune with the needs and concerns of our times. Everything on earth is not rational, and attempts to live by reason have all failed. The world has changed more radically in the last hundred years than in any previous era of history. Old values and certainties have been destroyed; religions have collapsed. In such a world, a voice which appears to come from the old world and to speak with the old sureness will have an obvious appeal. Lewis’s attempts to justify an old-fashioned Christian orthodoxy have made him an internationally celebrated and reassuring figure to those believers who have felt betrayed by the compromises of the mainline Christian churches. Lewis, to the amazement of those who knew him in his lifetime, has become in the quarter-century since he died something very like a saint in the minds of conservative-minded believers.

It is not the rational Lewis who makes this enormous appeal, the Lewis who lectured on medieval and Renaissance literature with such superb fluency and wide-ranging erudition to generations of English students. It is the Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to the present generation.

Though all Freud’s theories about the origins of consciousness may be disavowed, this remains the century of Freud. We have learnt that our lives are profoundly affected by what happened to us when we were very young children, and that wherever we travel in mind or body we are compelled to repeat or work out the drama of early years. If this were a work of psychoanalysis or literary theory, I should feel compelled to test The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by the theories of the human mind which have been adopted and discarded by psychoanalysts and philosophers in the last hundred years. But these are not areas which admit of rational enquiry, even if I were qualified to explore them, and Lewis himself would have been equally anxious to remind us of the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato which has attempted in the language of metaphysics to account for our sense that we do not belong in this world, that we are pilgrims and strangers here, homesick for another place where one day we shall be truly ourselves.

Two journeys, made in the course of my researches for this biography, have brought home to me more vividly than any others the strange nature of my task.

The first was to Belfast in Northern Ireland. For those who are not Irish, their first glimpse of modern Belfast is a shock. Much of its ancient prosperity, derived from its magnificent shipyards, has gone. There is widespread unemployment and poverty. Walking the streets of the working-class districts of the city one is confronted by distressing images of human irrationality. Even the kerbstones shriek of their religious and political allegiance. Protestant, Unionist streets are painted red, white and blue in praise of the Queen and the Reformation. Catholic, Nationalist streets are daubed white, green and orange for Ireland and the Pope. In no place on earth does it seem truer that Christ came to bring not peace, but a sword. The post offices and police stations are barricaded like fortresses. There is no prospect here of the rational prevailing. Every week that passes, a bomb explodes or a gun is fired because of ancient, atavistic religious prejudice.

It would not be the best place in the world to take a non-believer in the hope of persuading him or her that Christianity was a very ennobling belief, but it is a very good place for a Christian to recognize what a small part reason plays in most human lives; and it might very well prompt the visitor, and even more the resident, to hope that some form of Christianity could be expounded which was the agreed and good thing which all Christians hold in common, the set of unchanging and saving beliefs which Lewis named Mere Christianity.

Driving out of the beleaguered city into the suburbs is immediately to encounter a different, happier world, a prosperous middle-class place which knows no violence; big, comfortable houses built to sustain and celebrate the simple happiness of family life. Down one such leafy road, you will find the house built by a Belfast police solicitor named Albert Lewis in 1905. It was in this lumpy Edwardian villa that C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren spent the most crucial period of their lives. Climbing up the small back staircase, I reached a landing on the second floor of the house, and there at the end of the corridor I found the ‘Little End Room’ where the boys had escaped from the grown-ups and indulged their childhood games.

For Lewis himself, it was not a house with happy memories, for it was here that the catastrophe of his life took place: the death of his mother on 23 August 1908, when Lewis was nine years old. The loss was something which he bottled up within himself, unable to appease it through the emotionally stultifying years of boarding-school education in England. In terms of his emotional life, the quest for his lost mother dominated his relations with women. His companion for over thirty years was a woman old enough to be his mother; and when she died it was not long before, like a Pavlovian dog trained to lacerate his heart with the same emotional experiences, he married a woman whose circumstances were exactly parallel to those of his own mother in 1908 – a woman dying of cancer who had two small sons.

Standing in the Little End Room, I realized that I was beginning to come to terms with the Lewis phenomenon, and why it had such a hugely popular appeal. I had thought to go there merely in order to soak up ‘atmosphere’. I realized that what Lewis was seeking with such painful earnestness all his life was not to be found in this house; nor had it ever been, for any of the time he had lived there after his mother’s death. Without the capacity to develop an ‘ordinary’ emotional life, based on a stable relationship with parents, Lewis was driven back and back into the Little End Room, ‘further up and further in’.

It would have been good to see the wardrobe in Belfast, but it was not there. To see that, I journeyed over three and a half thousand miles to a small liberal arts college in the suburbs of Chicago: Wheaton College, Illinois. Between the two journeys I had spent months reading Lewis, and hours talking to those who knew him. An image of what he was actually like, as a man, was by now vividly clear to me. The reasons why many of his Oxford colleagues had disliked him were obvious. He was argumentative and bullying. His jolly, red, honest face was that of an intellectual bruiser. He was loud, and he could be coarse. He liked what he called ‘man’s talk’, and he was frequently contemptuous in his remarks about the opposite sex. He was a heavy smoker – sixty cigarettes a day between pipes – and he liked to drink deep, roaring out his unfashionable views in Oxford bars. This – the ‘beer and Beowulf’ Lewis – was understandably uncongenial to those of a different temperament. But I had also learnt that he was a kind and patient teacher, a loyal friend, a magnificently astute and intelligent conversationalist who had read much and who had the capacity to fire his hearers with a longing to read his favourite authors for themselves. Few of his friends had ever heard Lewis allude to his inner life, and even his religion was more to be taken for granted than to be aired in conversation. The gatherings of cronies in pubs or college rooms had no feeling of an evangelical prayer group. Two members of that celebrated group, known as the Inklings, have told me that there was always an air of English embarrassment when the subject of religion cropped up, and that Lewis’s activities as a religious broadcaster and writer were not something with which his fellow-Christians in the Inklings felt at ease. These men knew almost nothing of the Lewis who had emerged in my reading of private letters and diaries. They knew nothing from him of his childhood trauma, little of his two great emotional attachments to women, and next to nothing of his spiritual journey, even though one of these men, Hugo Dyson, had been responsible in part for persuading Lewis to abandon atheism and become a Christian.

C. S. Lewis the popular Christian apologist, who was reaching so many readers in Europe and the United States, was a phenomenon who had a life of his own in the minds of the reading public. His friends did know that this activity had generated an enormous band of admirers and enquirers, who wrote to Lewis from every corner of the globe and could be sure of getting a written reply.

Lewis did not ask to become a cult figure, but by writing so faithfully to his correspondents, he allowed the cult to build up. For many, including the penfriend he eventually married, the author of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity was a guru or spiritual master who might be expected to provide Answers to Life’s Problems. That is not the title of one of Lewis’s books. It is the title of a book by Dr Billy Graham, the most famous alumnus of Wheaton College, Illinois. As you approach the college, you see on your left an enormous Greek Revival building known as the Billy Graham Center, built in honour of the famous evangelist. It is hard to imagine Billy Graham enjoying C. S. Lewis’s company at any length, though I believe the two met during one of Dr Graham’s crusades in England. Lewis was impatient with puritanism and disliked non-smokers or teetotallers. He liked to talk of books, books, books, and he would not have shared any of Dr Graham’s political enthusiasms. But the wardrobe from Little Lea has come to repose at Wheaton College, Illinois.

The Marion E. Wade Center on the upper floor of the college library is devoted to the memorabilia of various Christian writers: George MacDonald, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren. The library has also recently acquired the papers of that veteran journalist and cynic Malcolm Muggeridge, and here the faithful may see Muggeridge’s portable typewriter kept, like the body of Lenin, in a glass case.

A portrait of C. S. Lewis, painted by T. M. Williams, smiles down on the reading room. It has the same glowing unreality as pious paintings of Thérèse of Lisieux or the Sacred Heart, adorning convent walls in days now gone. Hard by, in a glass display cabinet, are Lewis’s beer tankards and pipes, which in this abstemious atmosphere seem out of place. I worked at the table which, a brass plate informed me, had been in Lewis’s college rooms at Magdalen and subsequently in the dining-room at his house in Oxford, The Kilns. Dorothy L. Sayers and T. S. Eliot and many other famous people, it was claimed, had used this table. I had been reading Lewis, and talking to those who had known him, for the better part of twenty years, and doing serious research into his life for two years. I have come across no possible occasion when T. S. Eliot, with whom Lewis did not enjoy very cordial relations, would have used this table. What does it matter? The same sort of rationalist objections could be made about supposed relics of the True Cross. A piece of furniture stood in the corner of the room, carved by Lewis’s grandfather. It was the wardrobe. At Wheaton, one has stepped through the wardrobe into the world of make-believe.

Not long before my visit to Wheaton, a book by Kathryn Lindskoog had been drawn to my attention entitled The C. S. Lewis Hoax. It was published in Oregon in 1988 and it makes disturbing reading. Since its central thesis has been disproved, I imagine that it will not be published in Great Britain, though it was bought by a British publisher at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1988. Lindskoog claims that one of Lewis’s feebler posthumous works, a semi-obscene piece of science fiction called The Dark Tower, a continuation of his space trilogy, was not in fact the work of Lewis at all, but a forgery by someone else. A manuscript of this depressing fragment is deposited in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and experts have made it clear beyond doubt that it is written in Lewis’s hand. Nevertheless, Lindskoog’s book is concerned with a much wider issue than the authorship of The Dark Tower. It amounts to one of the most vitriolic personal attacks on a fellow-scholar, Walter Hooper, that I have ever read in print.

As Lyle W. Dorsett, the curator of the Marion E. Wade Center, concedes, Lindskoog has gone too far in her assaults on Hooper’s good name. Her notions of a forged Dark Tower are mistaken, and some of her other assertions – for example, that the title given by Hooper to Lewis’s letters to Arthur Greeves, They Stand Together, is a piece of pederastic argot – are wide of the mark. For those of us who have known Hooper for a very long time, however, there are moments in Lindskoog’s diatribe where we recognize bits of truth. Hooper does, as Lindskoog asserts, like people to believe that he knew Lewis much better and much longer than was really the case.

The details of Lindskoog’s book are unimportant to the general reader. What strikes an outsider is how violently the C. S. Lewis devotees seem to dislike one another. From very early days, there has been a Great Schism in their camp. It is notoriously difficult for those outside the borders of a religious dispute to describe with accuracy the sticking points involved, and if I attempted a detailed analysis of the Lewis feuds I should probably fall into as many errors as if I were to attempt a discourse on the difference between Shiite and Sunni Moslems.

Some of the quarrels had to do with the holdings of Lewis manuscripts. Walter Hooper, an American resident in Oxford, was anxious that a complete Lewis collection, either in original manuscript form or on microfiche, should be available to scholars in the Bodleian Library. The late Clyde S. Kilby, who was largely responsible for building up the Lewis collection at Wheaton, agreed to a proposal that there should be a free exchange between Wheaton and the Bodleian until a dispute arose about some letters. ‘Then all smiles stopped together.’

Walter Hooper, who has had the task of editing most of Lewis’s posthumous works and working directly with Lewis’s estate and publishers, has come in for the brunt of criticism from his fellow-countrymen back across the water, but over the years it has become clear that the quarrels are not merely about Hooper’s own role in Lewis’s life or about the ownership of various bits of paper. Two totally different Lewises are being revered by the faithful, and it is this which makes the disputes so painfully acrimonious. Hooper was for many years an extreme Anglo-Catholic priest, but has subsequently become a Roman Catholic. He presides over weekly meetings of the C. S. Lewis Society in Oxford where papers are read and discussions held by interested parties, mainly students. It is not an exclusively High Church group, but there is a distinctly Catholic bias in Hooper’s interpretation of Lewis which not everyone who knew the man would find completely believable. Most noticeably peculiar in Hooper’s picture of his hero is his belief in the Perpetual Virginity of C. S. Lewis. There is very direct evidence, both from Lewis’s brother-in-law Dr Davidman and from Lewis’s own pen, that Lewis was not a virgin and that his marriage was consummated. It would also be amazing, though no evidence is forthcoming either way, if Lewis’s thirty-year relationship with Mrs Moore was entirely asexual. Ordinary biographical criteria, however, are not allowed by Hooper to apply, since for him Lewis has become a sort of Catholic saint, and one can hardly believe in a Catholic saint both of whose sexual relationships were with women who had husbands still living. Therefore, when Lewis wrote in A Grief Observed that he and his wife were lovers, that they had ‘fallen in love’, that ‘a noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food’, that she was his ‘mistress’, that ‘we were one flesh’, that ‘no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied’, he was in fact writing a work of fiction. Hooper has a natural bent for hero-worship, and because he believes celibacy to be a high virtue he cannot believe that Lewis and his wife were, as the man himself wrote, ‘a sinful woman married to a sinful man’.

In the United States, among Lewis’s Protestant devotees, there is an analogous awkwardness about his passion for alcohol and tobacco. Some of Lewis’s American publishers actually ask for references to drinking and smoking to be removed from his work, and one has the strong feeling that this is not so much because they themselves disapprove of the activities as because they need a Lewis who was, against all evidence, a non-smoker and a lemonade-drinker.

It is the need which awakens the image, and once the image has been set up and revered, and emotion has been poured into it, there is something profoundly painful about the idea of anyone worshipping a different icon, or threatening to demolish all the icons. Lewis idolatry, like Christianity itself, has resorted to some ugly tactics as it breaks itself into factions. Hard words are used on both sides, and there is not much evidence of Christian charity when the war is at its hottest. In their libraries and periodicals, the differing Lewis factions have conceived for one another an enmity which would do Screwtape proud, and it provides a strange parallel to the sort of unhinged sectarian disputes which have dogged Lewis’s native Belfast for the last sixty years.

When we step beyond the wardrobe door, we expect battles. Witches and monsters will threaten our subconscious until we reach the longed-for consummation when change itself stands still and Aslan is King for ever.

A writer who can evoke such reactions is worthy of scrutiny, and scrutiny of a particular kind. When I had seen Belfast and Wheaton, I saw the extent of the problem facing Lewis’s biographer. Some time before, staying in the south of France with Christopher Tolkien, the son of J. R. R. Tolkien, I took down from the shelf a copy of Lewis’s book Letters to Malcolm, Chiefly on Prayer. Here was evidence, if any was needed, of how one of Lewis’s closest friends reacted to his last work of piety. The book is not ‘about prayer’, Tolkien writes in the margin, ‘but about Lewis praying’. ‘But’, he adds on the flyleaf, ‘the whole book is always interesting. Why? Because it is about Jack, by Jack, and that is a topic that no one who knew him well could fail to find interesting even when exasperating.’

I myself never knew Lewis, though I have known many people who did, and I have never failed to find their memories of the man interesting. Like Tolkien, I am puzzled. Why? In the same marginal note, Tolkien continues, ‘The book is in fact entirely egocentric, by which I do not mean that C.S.L. worshipped himself or was a proud or vain man, overesteeming his own worth or wisdom. But I do mean that as must be the case with anyone who essays autobiography, under any form, he found C.S.L. an absorbing topic.’

Lewis was in fact an obsessive autobiographer. Most of his later books are, as Tolkien says, all about himself, and he also wrote copiously on the subject to his many correspondents. Yet few writers have ever been less introspective: this is the paradox. He was not vain, but he had a capacity to project images of himself into prose; sometimes, one feels, without quite realizing what he was doing. It is these images which have such posthumous staying power. For me, the most attractive Lewis is the author of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, a fluent, highly intelligent man talking about books in a manner which is always engaging. This itself is a self-projection. Reading the book, you feel you know what it was like to hear him talk. This is ten times truer of his religious books, and since many readers will associate Lewis’s tone of voice with some of their deepest and most profoundly felt religious moments, there is no wonder that they guard their images of him jealously.

Lewis himself, in his own words that ‘sinful man’, wrote in his most devastatingly personal book A Grief Observed that ‘All reality is iconoclastic. The earthly beloved, even in this life, incessantly triumphs over your mere idea of her. And you want her to; you want her with all her resistances, all her faults, all her unexpectedness. That is, in her foursquare and independent reality. And this, not any image or memory, is what we are to love still, after she is dead.’

This book is not intended to be iconoclastic, but I will try to be realistic, not only because reality is more interesting than fantasy, but also because we do Lewis no honour to make him into a plaster saint. And he deserves our honour.