Mrs Moore died in January 1951, aged nearly eighty. Always a demanding woman, during the last years of her life she became tyrannical, forbidding Lewis to light a fire in his study at the Kilns so as to save fuel, engendering quarrels among the maids, and, as Warnie Lewis described it in his diary, ‘going mad through trying to live on hate instead of love’. In 1944 she had a stroke, and thereafter she kept to her bed, but not until April 1950 was her condition sufficiently poor for her to be removed to a nursing home. Jack visited her every day. ‘She is in no pain but her mind has almost completely gone,’ he said. ‘What traces of it remain seem gentler and more placid than I have known for years.’ When the winter was at its most severe she caught influenza and died.
‘So ends the mysterious self-imposed tyranny in which J. has lived for at least thirty years,’ Warnie wrote in his diary. And of life at the Kilns without Mrs Moore he declared, ‘Gosh, how I am loving it all!’ Even Jack was obliged to admit that life was easier. ‘I specially need your prayers,’ he wrote to Sister Penelope at Wantage, ‘because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across “a plain called Ease”. Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present.’ And in the autumn of the year following Mrs Moore’s death he told Arthur Greeves that he had just passed through ‘what has perhaps been the happiest year of my life’.
A few months before Mrs Moore was taken into the nursing home there came, among Lewis’s invariably large mail from readers of his books, a letter from a Mrs Joy Gresham who lived in the neighbourhood of New York. ‘Just another American fan,’ remarked Warnie, ‘with however the difference that she stood out from the rut by her amusing and well-written letters, and soon J. and she had become “pen-friends”.’ In 1952 she told Lewis that she was coming to England for a time, and he invited her to Oxford.
*
Joy Davidman was born in New York City in 1915. Her parents were Jews who had come to America from eastern Europe in their childhood, and her mother brought her up on tales of Jewish village life in the Ukraine, a life where more than six hundred ritual laws governed daily conduct, and religion was of the letter rather than the spirit. Her father and mother had abandoned Judaism; Joy declared herself an atheist at the age of eight, after reading H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. ‘In a few years’, she recalled, ‘I had rejected all morality as a pipe dream. If life had no meaning, what was there to live for except pleasure? Luckily for me, my preferred pleasure happened to be reading, or I shouldn’t have been able to stay out of hot water as well as I did.’
If she had any philosophy in her childhood, it was a belief in American prosperity. But that faith was destroyed by the Depression, and by 1930 she believed in nothing. ‘Men, I said, are only apes. Love, art, and altruism are only sex. The universe is only matter. Matter is only energy. I forget what I said energy was only.’ Yet she was also a poet, and in her verse she asked whether life was really no more than just a matter of satisfying one’s appetites:
Come now all Americans
kiss and accept your city, the harsh mother,
New York, the clamor, the sweat, the heart of brown land.
This is New York,
our city; a kind place to live in; bountiful – our city
envied by the world and by the young in lonely places.
We have the bright-lights, the bridges, the Yankee Stadium
and if we are not contented then we should be
and if we are discontented we do not know it,
and anyhow it has always been this way.
She read eagerly: ghost stories, science fiction, the tales of George MacDonald and Lord Dunsany. She revelled in the supernatural. ‘It interested me above all else,’ she said. But she did not believe in it.
After school she went to Hunter College in New York and then to Columbia University where she received her M.A. in English Literature. She took a job teaching English in New York high schools, and she joined the Communist Party. ‘All I knew was that capitalism wasn’t working very well, war was imminent – and socialism promised to change all that. And for the first time in my life I was willing to be my brother’s keeper. So I rushed round to a Party acquaintance and said I wanted to join.’ She became an energetic worker for the Party, and she published a volume of poems entitled Letter to a Comrade.
bow and set your mouth against America
which you will make fine and the treasure of its men,
which you will give to the workers and those who turn land over with the plough.
There is no miracle of help
fixed in the stars, there is no magic, no savior
smiling in blatant ink on election posters;
only the strength of men.
Yet there was a delicacy of imagery in her poetry too, and the volume won two awards. She gave up teaching to devote her time to writing, and her first novel, Anya, was published in 1940. It was based on her mother’s childhood memories, and gave a vivid account of Jewish village life in the Ukraine during the late nineteenth century, as seen through the eyes of Anya, the shopkeeper’s daughter who rejects the strict conventions of her people and goes in search of love, wherever she may find it. The book had something about it of D. H. Lawrence.
For a few months Joy Davidman had a job with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in Hollywood, as a junior scriptwriter. Then in 1942 she married a fellow Communist, William Lindsay Gresham. Born in 1909, in his time Bill Gresham had worked as office boy, copywriter, singer in Greenwich Village clubs, and reviewer for a New York newspaper. Brought up an agnostic, he toyed for some time with Unitarian theology, but later became an atheist and joined the Communist Party. In 1937 he went out to Spain to fight on the Communist side; he spent fifteen months there, never fired a shot, and came home in a state of mind so bad that shortly afterwards he tried to hang himself. Psychoanalysis restored him to some degree of self-confidence, but he became a heavy drinker. He managed, however, to hold down a series of editorial jobs on popular story-magazines. It was at this stage that his first marriage was ended by divorce and he married Joy Davidman.
They set up home in upstate New York, and two sons were born to them, David and Douglas. Neither Joy nor Bill Gresham now had much time or inclination for Party activities, though they still called themselves Communist and, out of habit, accepted Marxist philosophy. Meanwhile Joy’s taste for books about the supernatural led her to The Screwtape Letters and The Great Divorce. ‘These books stirred an unused part of my brain to momentary sluggish life,’ she said. ‘Of course, I thought, atheism was true; but I hadn’t given quite enough attention to developing the proof of it. Someday, when the children were older, I’d work it out. Then I forgot the whole matter.’
Bill Gresham was still going through mental difficulties, and one day he rang Joy from his New York office to say he was having a nervous breakdown. He felt his mind going; he could not stay where he was and he could not bring himself to come home. Then he rang off. For hours, Joy tried frantically to find out what had happened to him. In the end she gave up and waited. ‘I put the babies to sleep. For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, “the master of my fate” and “the captain of my soul”. All my defences – the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I had hid from God – went down momentarily. And God came in. There was a Person with me in the room, directly present to my consciousness – a Person so real that all my previous life was by comparison mere shadow play. I understood that God had always been there, and that, since childhood, I had been pouring half my energy into the task of keeping him out. My perception of God lasted perhaps half a minute. When it was over I found myself on my knees, praying. I think I must have been the world’s most astonished atheist.’
When Bill Gresham finally came home, he accepted his wife’s experience without questioning it, largely because he himself had become interested in the supernatural. Together they began to study the outlines of theology. Joy considered becoming a practising Jew of the ‘Reformed’ persuasion, but soon decided that she must accept Christianity. Then in the summer of 1948, Bill Gresham, frightened by his alchoholism, prayed for help to stop drinking. ‘And my prayer was answered,’ he wrote in 1951. ‘Up until now I have never taken another drink.’ This gave him the final spur to accepting Christianity, and he and Joy became Presbyterians.
They were both having some success as writers. Bill Gresham’s first thriller, Nightmare Alley, was published in 1946. It sold well and was bought up for the cinema. Joy’s second novel, Weeping Bay (dealing with the miseries of an impoverished community in Canada), came out in 1950 and was well reviewed. In 1951 the Greshams each contributed an account of their conversion to Christianity to a Protestant anthology. But their marriage continued to go through difficulties, and in 1952 Joy decided to travel to England, in the hope that some months of separation would help it. During her English trip, C. S. Lewis invited her to Oxford and gave a lunch party in her honour at Magdalen.
*
Warnie Lewis met her for the first time on that occasion. ‘I was some little time in making up my mind about her,’ he wrote in his diary. ‘She proved to be a Jewess, or rather a Christian convert of Jewish race, medium height, good figure, horn rimmed specs., quite extraordinarily uninhibited.’ At the Magdalen lunch ‘she turned to me,’ wrote Warnie, ‘in the presence of three or four men, and asked in the most natural tone in the world, “Is there anywhere in this monastic establishment where a lady can relieve herself?” But her visit was a great success, and we had many merry days together; and when she left for home in January 1953, it was with common regrets, and a sincere hope that we would meet again.’
Lewis was astonished by her. ‘Her mind was lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard,’ he wrote of her. ‘Passion, tenderness and pain were all equally unable to disarm it. It scented the first whiff of cant or slush; then sprang, and knocked you over before you knew what was happening. How many bubbles of mine she pricked! I soon learned not to talk rot to her unless I did it for the sheer pleasure of being exposed and laughed at.’
Joy went home to her husband in January 1953, but it quickly became apparent that the marriage was at an end. Allowing him to divorce her for desertion, she came back to England, bringing the two boys and setting up home in London. Thanks to financial help from her parents she was able to send the boys to a preparatory school in Surrey. Then, in the winter of 1953, she and her sons came to stay with the Lewises at the Kilns.
‘Last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys, aged nine and seven respectively,’ Lewis wrote to a friend in December. ‘Can you imagine two crusted old bachelors in such a situation? It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting; the energy of the American small boy is astonishing. This pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as they got back to the ground, “Let’s do it again!” Without being in the least priggish, they struck us as being amazingly adult by our standards and one could talk to them as one would to “grown-ups” – though the next moment they would be wrestling like puppies on the sitting room floor.’ Lewis dedicated the Narnia story that was just about to be published, The Horse and his Boy, to the two boys.
Joy was writing another book, rather on the model of Lewis’s Christian apologetics. With her Jewish origins in mind she chose as her subject an interpretation of the Ten Commandments in terms of contemporary life. The book, Smoke on the Mountain, was published in 1955 with a foreword by Lewis. Though it did not equal his brilliance it was the product of much thought and imagination, and it was enriched by her own experience of life.
In the first weeks of 1954 she helped Lewis move to Cambridge. ‘Poor lamb,’ she wrote to friends, ‘he was suffering all the pangs and qualms of a new boy going to a formidable school – he went around muttering, “Oh, what a fool I am! I had a good home and I left!” and turning his mouth down at the corners most pathetical. He always makes his distresses into a joke, but of course there’s a genuine grief in leaving a place like Magdalen after thirty years; rather like a divorce, I imagine. Even I feel I shall miss those cloisters after a mere dozen visits! The Cambridge college is nothing like so beautiful, though pleasant enough; and Lewis has just written to say that they only get one glass of port after dinner, instead of Magdalen’s three! In spite of the move, he keeps on working as hard as usual; has finished his autobiography – I’ve got the last chapters here now and must get my wits to work on criticism.’ The autobiography was entitled, apparently without any intention of a double meaning, Surprised by Joy.
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 of 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 Lewis 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?’
Till We Have Faces is possibly Lewis’s best book. He himself thought so, preferring it even to his earlier favourite, Perelandra. Ironically it had a poorer reception than any other story he had written.
*
Lewis’s Cambridge friends had hoped that he would prove a real opponent to the leading critic in that university at the time, F. R. Leavis of Downing College, whose demand for social earnestness in literature and literary criticism had for many years greatly coloured the thinking of undergraduates. But they had left it too late. Lewis was, by his own admission, past his intellectual prime; he told Professor Basil Willey, when he was still hesitating to accept the Cambridge chair: ‘We Lewises burn out quickly.’ At Cambridge he made little attempt to set up in opposition to Leavis. He continued to lecture on the background to medieval and Renaissance literature, and published the lectures as The Discarded Image; but his audiences were rather smaller than they had been in Oxford, though just as enthusiastic. His only real attempt to answer Leavis was An Experiment in Criticism, which he published in 1961 and which suggested that we should ‘scrutinise’ not books and writers in the manner of Leavis and his followers, but should rather categorise the readers. It was ingenious, but too oblique to make any real impact. A few Cambridge undergraduates were impressed by it. ‘Can it be that the tide is turning at last?’ Lewis asked hopefully after receiving fan-letters from one or two of them; and he also remarked: ‘Some of the younger men express great dissatisfaction at the rule of Downing.’ But it was a vain hope. In truth Lewis, who had for years attacked (openly or by implication) Leavis’s notions of ‘culture’, who regarded Leavis’s mode of criticism as fundamentally wrong because of its subjective basis, and who had perhaps hoped ever since his essay ‘Christianity and Literature’ to help to establish a school of criticism based on objective (and ultimately Christian and traditional) criteria, was no longer a fighter. Indeed, when he actually met Leavis he found him to be ‘quiet, charming and kindly’. There were one or two unhappy incidents when, at question-and-answer sessions after Lewis had addressed undergraduate societies, the more fervent disciples of Leavis would ask pointed questions about the ‘social relevance’ of Lewis’s own works of fiction, and Lewis’s temper might flare up. But he did not confuse the disciples with the master, and when it was suggested that he might like to accept the post of Chairman of the Faculty Board he not only refused but suggested that a good candidate might be Leavis.
At this time he made his peace too with another old adversary, or at least someone whom he had seen as an adversary. He and T. S. Eliot were both on the commission to revise the language of the Psalter, and they were soon on the friendliest terms. One day in the summer of 1959 Lewis and Joy had lunch with Eliot and his new wife Valerie. It was an event which the pre-war Lewis would have declared to be in every respect impossible.
*
Lewis was no longer in good health. During the period of Joy’s recovery he too contracted a bone disease, and although it was not malignant and was soon brought under control he was obliged to live carefully. ‘I wear a surgical belt and shall probably never be able to take a real walk again,’ he told a friend, ‘but it somehow doesn’t worry me. The intriguing thing is that while I (for no discoverable reason) was losing the calcium from my bones, Joy, who needed it much more, was gaining it in hers. One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! Well, never was gift more gladly given; but one must not be fanciful.’
As to Joy’s condition, though she still limped badly (‘the doctors, rather than the disease, shortened one leg’. Lewis said) she was otherwise in good health. The bones had rebuilt themselves firmly. ‘Of course the sword of Damocles hangs over us,’ Lewis often remarked; but there was much ground for optimism. Not long after her recovery they went for a brief holiday (‘you might call it a belated honeymoon’, he said) to Ireland, travelling by air so as to avoid the sudden jolts likely on board ship. For both of them it was their first flight. ‘We found it – after our initial moment of terror – enchanting,’ Lewis said. ‘The cloud-scape seen from above is a new world of beauty – and then the rifts in the clouds through which one sees “a glimpse of that dark world where I was born” …’ At home, Joy sometimes helped Lewis with his correspondence, especially to American readers of his books:
Dear Mary,
Perhaps you won’t mind a letter from me this time, instead of Jack? He is having his first go at examining for the Cambridge tripos, and is fairly drowning in examination papers. He can’t even get home for the next fortnight; our longest separation since our marriage, and we’re both feeling it badly!
Of course we’re both praying for you – and don’t be too afraid, even if you turn out to need an operation. I’ve had three, and they were nothing like so bad as my fears.
Blessings,
Yours,
Joy Lewis.
Then in October 1959 an X-ray check revealed that cancerous spots were returning to many of her bones.
‘This last check is the only one we approached without dread,’ Lewis told Roger Lancelyn Green. ‘Her health seemed so complete. It is like being recaptured by the Giant when you have passed every gate and are almost out of sight of his castle.’
There was still some hope. ‘Meanwhile you have the waiting,’ Lewis said. ‘And while you wait, you still have to go on living – if only one could go underground, hibernate, sleep it out. And then the horrible by-products of anxiety: the incessant, circular movement of the thoughts, even the Pagan temptation to keep watch for irrational omens. And one prays; but mainly such prayers are themselves a form of anguish.’ He asked Father Peter Milward: ‘Can one without presumption ask for a second miracle?’
Joy began to experience slowly increasing amounts of pain; yet, as Warnie Lewis recorded in his diary, ‘her courage and vitality were such that one was able to forget the grim fact for hours and even days at a time’. She was even determined that she and Jack should go on the holiday to Greece that they had planned to take with Roger Lancelyn Green and his wife June; and though Joy was by that time suffering considerably the party left London Airport on 3 April 1960 and flew to Athens. During the following fortnight the Lewises did not join in the more strenuous expeditions (they were travelling as part of a ‘package’ tour), but they climbed the Acropolis, visited Mycenae and Rhodes, and went with the Lancelyn Greens in a private hired car on a day’s expedition to the Gulf of Corinth. The Greek trip – Lewis’s first journey abroad since the First World War – had been Joy’s greatest remaining ambition, and on their return Lewis told Chad Walsh, ‘She came back in a nunc dimittis frame of mind, having realized, beyond hope, her greatest, lifelong, this-worldly desire.’
Secondary cancer had now developed, and Joy had to go to hospital. During this time, Tolkien’s wife Edith who was also in hospital met her and became friendly with her; this helped at least in some degree to reconcile Tolkien to Lewis’s marriage. On 20 May Joy had to have her right breast removed. The operation went well, and a fortnight later she was sent home in good spirits, though she could now only move about in a wheelchair. She was still able, though, to make a few short expeditions. Warnie wheeled her about the garden so that she could inspect her plants, and late in June (after another spell in hospital following a severe relapse) she and Jack were even able to go out to dinner at Studley Priory hotel. ‘It is incredible,’ he recalled, ‘how much happiness, even how much gaiety, we sometimes had together after all hope was gone.’
On the night of Tuesday 12 July Warnie took the usual evening cups of tea to Joy and Jack, and found them playing Scrabble. ‘Before I dropped off to sleep,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘they sounded as if they were reading a play together.’ (‘How long, how tranquilly, how nourishingly, we talked together that last night!’ Lewis later wrote). Next morning Warnie was woken at a quarter past six by Joy’s screams: she had severe pains which seemed to be in the stomach but were really in the spine. Warnie woke Jack who called the doctor; he arrived before seven and drugged her, ‘but even now she has tremendous resistance’, Warnie wrote in his diary, ‘and this and subsequent dopings did no more than make her drowsy’. After a nightmare morning of telephoning and argument with the hospital authorities, Lewis at last managed to arrange for the surgeon to give her a bed in his private ward at the Radcliffe Infirmary. She was taken there by ambulance, still conscious. Jack went with her.
Once during these days he had written a poem.
All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you.
I never had a selfless thought since I was born.
I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through:
I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.
Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek,
I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin
I talk of love – a scholar’s parrot may talk Greek –
But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.
Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack.
I see the chasm. And everything you are was making
My heart into a bridge by which I might get back
From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.
Late the same night, a few hours after Joy had been taken into hospital, Warnie wrote in his diary: ‘When I was in my bath about 11.40 p.m. I heard J. come into the house and went out to meet him. Self: “What news?” J.: “She died about twenty minutes ago.”’
*
‘No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.
‘There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met her. I’ve plenty of what are called “resources”. People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this “commonsense” vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.’
Writing had always been Lewis’s way of coping with life, and now he began to write once again, recording his thoughts in the days and weeks after Joy’s death. This was not like the loss of Charles Williams, when there had been easy assurances of his supernatural presence. ‘I had for some time a most vivid feeling of certainty about his continued life; even his enhanced life. I have begged to be given even one hundredth part of the same assurance. There is no answer. Only the locked door, the iron curtain, the vacuum, absolute zero. “Them as asks don’t get.” I was a fool to ask. For now, even if that assurance came, I should distrust it. I should think it a self-hypnosis induced by my own prayers.’
There was also the danger not of ceasing to believe in God, but of going back to his old belief in a cruel God, the belief that had haunted him in his early days before his conversion to Christianity. ‘The conclusion I dread is not “So there’s no God after all”, but “So this is what God’s really like. Deceive yourself no longer.”’ And again: ‘Sooner or later I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good”? Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite?’
The grief slowly eased. After a time his prayers ceased to be the same desperate demands for help. ‘I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted. Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face?’ One night, quite unexpectedly, he thought he felt some sense of Joy’s presence. He had said that even if such a thing did happen, he would regard it as self-hypnosis. But now, ‘Easier said than done. It was quite incredibly unemotional. Just the impression of her mind momentarily facing my own.’ Her mind, not her emotions. ‘Didn’t people dispute once whether the final vision of God was more an act of intelligence or of love? That is probably another of the nonsense questions.’ And he remembered her last words in hospital, spoken not to him but to the chaplain. ‘I am at peace with God’, she had said. ‘She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all’eterna fontana.’1
*
And after that there is really nothing more to be said. Lewis published these thoughts pseudonymously under the title A Grief Observed. He continued to work at Cambridge. He met his friends regularly in the Bird and Baby, reluctantly changing the meeting-place to the Lamb and Flag across the road when the Bird was disagreeably ‘modernised’. He wrote Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, a wise and gentle book whose subject he had attempted before, but for which he only now found the form. Occasionally he saw Tolkien, who lived not very far away on the other side of Headington; but their meetings were rare. He contributed an essay to the Festschrift published in 1962 to mark Tolkien’s seventieth birthday. In November of that year, Tolkien wrote him a letter (which does not survive) asking him whether he would be at the dinner to mark its publication. He replied to Tolkien, on a postcard:
What a nice letter. I also like beer less than I did, tho’ I have retained the taste for general talk. But I shan’t be at the Festschrift dinner. I wear a catheter, live on a low protein diet, and go early to bed. I am, if not a lean, at least a slippered pantaloon. All the best. Yours, Jack.
He was supposed to be having an operation on his prostate, but the surgeon would not perform it until his heart and kidneys were in a better condition; and after a time the plans for the operation were abandoned. In the summer of 1963 he had a heart attack, but recovered. ‘I can’t help feeling it was rather a pity I did survive,’ he remarked. ‘I mean, having glided so painlessly up to the Gate it seems hard to have it shut in one’s face and know that the whole process must some day be gone through again, and perhaps less pleasantly. Poor Lazarus!’
Reluctantly, he gave up his Cambridge professorship, and kept to a ground-floor room at the Kilns. A young American, Walter Hooper, came to live in the house for a time as companion and secretary, but had to go home in September 1963 to wind up his affairs before returning (as he intended) on a permanent basis. By this time Warnie was away, drinking heavily on his annual Irish holiday, and for a long time failing to return despite appeals from Jack’s friends. Jack was left in the care of the housekeeper and the gardener, not greatly happy in this near-solitude but certain that at least he would not have long to wait. He was, he told Arthur Greeves, ‘quite comfortable and cheerful. The only real snag is that it looks as if you and I shall never meet again in this life.’
At last Warnie came home. ‘The wheel had come full circle,’ he said. ‘Once again we were together in the little end room at home, shutting out from our talk the ever-present knowledge that the holidays were ending, and that a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both.’
On the afternoon of Friday 22 November 1963, not long after taking Jack his tea, Warnie heard a crash and found his brother lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. Jack Lewis died a few minutes later. He was not quite sixty-five. The news of his death was a little overshadowed by the fact that on the same day President Kennedy was assassinated.
The funeral was held four days later at Headington Quarry parish church. Among those in the congregation were Barfield, Havard and Tolkien. ‘The coffin was carried out into the churchyard and set down,’ recalled Peter Bayley, who was also there. ‘It was a very cold, frosty morning, but the winter sun coming through the yews was brilliantly bright. One candle stood on the coffin. The flame burned steadily. Although out in the open air, it did not so much as flicker.’
*
Some years earlier, Havard had remarked to Lewis that the Inklings would come to an end if he was not there. Lewis replied that this was nonsense; and now, after his death, there was some attempt to keep up the meetings at the Lamb and Flag. But they were soon abandoned as being absurd without Lewis. As Havard said, ‘He was the link who bound us all together.’
*
Warnie Lewis lived for another ten years, remaining for most of that time at the Kilns. He died in the same year as Tolkien, 1973.
*
Not long after Lewis’s death, Tolkien began a letter to one of his children:
‘I am sorry that I have not answered your letters sooner; but Jack Lewis’s death on the 22nd has preoccupied me. It is also involving me in some correspondence, as many people still regard me as one of his intimates. Alas! that ceased to be some ten years ago. We were separated first by the sudden apparition of Charles Williams, and then by his marriage. But we owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie, with the deep affection that it begot, remained. He was a great man of whom the cold-blooded official obituaries have only scraped the surface.’
THE END