How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, “I am at peace with God.” She smiled, but not at me.
—A Grief Observed, chapter 4
Famous Christian Author: The 1950s
In a letter dated December 20, 1951, Lewis writes to an American friend, “I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown” (CLIII, 150).
Jack was halfway serious about his diminishing fame, despite the fact that he had just seen the release of the second book in what looked like it might become a somewhat-successful series—but only moderately successful; nothing like what he had known in his forties.
The book Jack had just published was Prince Caspian. It followed The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which had come out twelve months earlier, in 1950. They would become the first installments in the Chronicles of Narnia—seven books that would be released one each year from 1950 to 1956 and would go on to outsell all of Lewis’s other works combined.
Radio Times, a weekly magazine published by the BBC that provides television and radio program listings for the UK, briefly featured a four-page pullout supplement for children titled Junior Radio Times. It was there, on July 15, 1960—ten years after the release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—that Lewis provided an account of how he came to write the Chronicles of Narnia. In a piece published under the headline “It All Began with a Picture,” Lewis told the young readers:
One thing I am sure of. All my seven Narnian books, and my three science-fiction books, began with seeing pictures in my head. At first they were not a story, just pictures. The Lion all began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. The picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day when I was about forty, I said to myself: “Let’s try to make a story about it.”
At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it. I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about that time. Apart from that, I don’t know where the Lion came from or why He came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after Him. (53)
We have on record here that Lewis first attempted at age forty to turn this image of what would become Mr. Tumnus into a story. We may also have elsewhere a glimpse, but only that, from the time years before when the first pictures of Narnia initially came to him.
On November 17, 1914—twelve days before his sixteenth birthday—Jack wrote a letter to Arthur describing the early snowfall that had blanketed Great Bookham and Gastons, where he was living with the Kirkpatricks. With an allusion to Edvard Grieg’s “March of the Dwarves,” a musical piece Jack particularly enjoyed, he reported to Arthur on the snow.
We have been deeply covered with it all week, and the pine wood near here, with the white masses on ground and trees, forms a beautiful sight. One almost expects a “march of dwarfs” to come dashing past! How I long to break away into a world where such things were true: this real, hard, dirty, Monday morning modern world stifles one. (CLI, 95)
In C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, Walter Hooper provides the following paragraph, which was found on the back of one of Lewis’s other manuscripts. These four sentences, penned by Jack in 1939 when he was about forty, are the first words he wrote for the story that would eventually become The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, a work begun partly in response to a group of children who came to stay at the Kilns during the war.
This book is about four children whose names were Ann, Martin, Rose and Peter. But it is mostly about Peter who was the youngest. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the Air Raids, and because Father, who was in the army, had gone off to the war and Mother was doing some kind of war work. They were sent to stay with a relation of Mother’s who was a very old Professor who lived by himself in the country. (402)
What Lewis does not mention in his piece for Junior Radio Times is that after trying to make the faun image into a story when he was forty, he got stuck. Really stuck. After writing just this one paragraph in 1939, he set the project aside and did not return to it for eight years. Then, around 1947, Jack started having dreams of the lion who pulled together not just this story but the other six as well.
Peter is the only character from this earliest start at the novel to make it into the later version of the story, where his age is reversed from youngest to oldest. Lewis kept the original number and gender for his protagonists—two girls and two boys. Unlike in the passage above, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe there is no indication that the Professor and the children are relatives. In fact, the old Professor is a rather mysterious stranger whom the Pevensie children have no connection with before going to stay at his home. Finally, if Lewis’s original intention was to make the story “mostly about Peter who was the youngest,” to some extent he kept this focus in the book’s final form, where more attention is given to the youngest child, although this character is now Lucy.
While it is beyond the scope of this book to discuss all seven Chronicles in detail, readers interested in learning more can find excellent books about Narnia written by Jonathan Rogers, Paul Ford, Peter Schakel, Bruce Edwards, Marvin Hinten, and David Downing. The discussion below will point out a few key details, but the spiritual themes that Lewis weaves into these stories will be our focus.
Perhaps the first thing that must be said about the Narnia stories is what they are not. With The Pilgrim’s Regress and “The Weight of Glory,” we have seen that when he wanted to, Jack was able to write an allegory or a sermon.
The Chronicles of Narnia are neither.
In a letter written in 1958, Lewis contrasts his approach in the Chronicles of Narnia with Bunyan’s approach in The Pilgrim’s Progress.
If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair represents Despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, “What might Christ become like if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?” This is not allegory at all. (CLIII, 1004)
In this same letter, Lewis gives a word for what he was trying to do in the Chronicles—not allegory but supposal.
Because this difference often confuses readers, Lewis clarified it in several letters, including one later published in Letters to Children. Again contrasting his work with Bunyan’s, Lewis writes to a fifth-grade class in Maryland:
You are mistaken when you think that everything in the books “represents” something in this world. Things do that in The Pilgrim’s Progress but I’m not writing that way. I did not say to myself “let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia”: I said “Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as He became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.” If you think about it, you will see that it is quite a different thing. (44–45)
And so while Aslan is the answer to Lewis’s supposal of what the Son of God might be like in a land like Narnia, the High King Peter is not meant to represent the apostle Peter, Edmund as a traitor does not represent Judas, and Lewis did not set out to have the White Witch be Pontius Pilate.
Perhaps the clearest expression of what Lewis hoped to do through the Narnia stories can be found in his essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to Be Said.” There Lewis explains that by casting spiritual truths into the imaginary world of Narnia, he hoped they could be freed of any off-putting “stained-glass and Sunday school associations” they might have been shackled with and thus could for the first time “appear in their real potency” (47). Referring to the barriers that instantly go up when some people hear words with any connection to the church, Lewis concludes: “Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could.”
Was Lewis successful in making Christian truths appear in their real potency? Fans all over the world will attest to the power of the Narnia stories. Among the most moving episodes are the account of Aslan’s sacrifice for Edmund in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the depiction of Narnia’s creation in The Magician’s Nephew, and the story of Narnia’s end in The Last Battle.
Here are just a few of the spiritual truths that Lewis explores in the Chronicles of Narnia:
In the Narnia stories, we also see the deep spiritual longing Lewis himself experienced in life. Besides Shasta’s desire to travel to the North and his true home in The Horse and His Boy and Reepicheep’s longing to reach Aslan’s Country in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we also find this longing—this time fulfilled—in The Last Battle as the heroes of the seven Chronicles finally reach the land they have been looking for all their lives.
Later, in Letters to Malcolm, Lewis will propose that while the relation between God and a human being is more private and intimate than any relationship between two humans could ever be, there is also a far greater distance between the participants. He accuses Malcolm of making the relationship between God and man too snug and suggests that Malcolm’s view needs to be supplemented by Revelation 1:17, where St. John reports that he fell at the feet of the risen Lord as one who was dead. Lewis goes on to write, “I think the ‘low’ church milieu that I grew up in did tend to be too cosily at ease in Zion” (13).
Throughout the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis seeks to expand on the mere coziness that some Christians may feel toward God. In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Mr. Beaver describes Aslan to the children: “Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good” (80). Several chapters later when the children actually meet Aslan, the narrator steps in to tell us, “People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time” (126).
Here we find one of Lewis’s greatest teachings. Christians who have an image of a God who is only good—as many do—need to be reminded that he is also terrible—or, we might say, terrifying. At the same time, those who have an image of a God who is only terrifying—as we have seen that Lewis himself did as a young believer—need to be reminded that he is good as well. Lewis’s portrait of Aslan serves as a corrective to both errors.
One final testimony to the ability of the Chronicles of Narnia to present Christian truths in their real potency can be found in an exchange of letters Lewis had with the mother of a nine-year-old American boy named Laurence Krieg. Mrs. Krieg had written to Lewis about her son’s concern that he loved Aslan more than Jesus. In Lewis’s response, found in Letters to Children, he puts her fears to rest and also reveals some of his own intentions in creating the character of the great lion.
Laurence can’t really love Aslan more than Jesus, even if he feels that’s what he is doing. For the things he loves Aslan for doing or saying are simply the things Jesus really did and said. So that when Laurence thinks he is loving Aslan, he is really loving Jesus: and perhaps loving Him more than he ever did before. (52)
While the Chronicles of Narnia dominated Lewis’s literary output in the 1950s, there were many other noteworthy publications. The following list of books Lewis authored during this decade reveals an author who was still at the very top of his abilities and, despite his own assertion, far from finished being famous:
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (fairy tale, 1950)
Prince Caspian (fairy tale, 1951)
Mere Christianity (apologetics, 1952)
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (fairy tale, 1953)
The Silver Chair (fairy tale, 1954)
The Horse and His Boy (fairy tale, 1954)
English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (literary criticism, 1954)
The Magician’s Nephew (fairy tale, 1955)
Surprised by Joy (autobiography, 1955)
The Last Battle (fairy tale, 1956)
Till We Have Faces (fiction, 1958)
Reflections on the Psalms (apologetics, 1958)
Though the close, intense friendship between Lewis and Tolkien waned somewhat in the 1950s and 1960s, perhaps a comment from a letter Tolkien wrote in 1967, three years after Jack’s death, may serve to summarize Lewis’s literary achievement. Tolkien qualifies his statement, reminding his correspondent that neither of them liked all that they found in the other’s fiction. He was particularly unimpressed by Lewis’s Narnia books. But despite this, Tolkien declares, “The most lasting pleasure and reward for both of us has been that we provided one another with stories to hear or read that we really liked—in large parts” (378).
The first half of the 1950s brought one other professional accomplishment for Jack that is worthy of note. After being passed over for a professorship at Oxford not once but twice—in part due to his choice to write publicly about his faith—Lewis was offered the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, a much better position, which Tolkien convinced him to accept. On December 29, 1954, Jack gave his inaugural lecture to a standing-room-only audience. He remained a professor at Cambridge until his retirement in 1963, staying at his new college, Magdalene, during the week and at the Kilns on weekends and holidays.
The Fan from America, Two Weddings, and a Funeral
In 1965, Jocelyn Gibb, who had been Jack’s friend and publisher, put together a book of essays titled Light on C. S. Lewis. The contributors, who had all known Lewis personally, were asked to comment on what sort of man he was. In his essay, “The Approach to English,” Neville Coghill tells of an occasion where Jack confessed to him, “I never expected to have, in my sixties, the happiness that passed me by in my twenties” (63). Jack had invited his old friend to have lunch at Merton College. The comment came as they saw Jack’s wife, Joy, across the grassy quadrangle.
It is safe to say no one anticipated the happiness that the aging, bachelor don from Belfast and the Jewish American divorcée from the Bronx—sixteen years his junior, a former member of the Communist Party, and a recent convert to Christianity—were to bring each other.
Nor did anyone anticipate the grief Jack would have in his sixties—the anguish that came following Joy’s death.
In a letter he wrote from the Kirkpatricks’ house on October 12, 1915, Jack told Arthur Greeves: “You ask me whether I have ever been in love: fool as I am, I am not quite such a fool as all that. . . . But though I have no personal experience of the thing they call love, I have what is better—the experience of Sappho, of Euripides, of Catullus, of Shakespeare, of Spenser, of Austen, of Bronte, of, of—anyone else I have read” (CLI, 146). Four decades later, this all changed. In his late fifties, Jack gladly became love’s fool and experienced love personally—and found it to be infinitely better than just reading about the experience of others.
Joy and Jack’s full story has been told in a number of places. Readers interested in learning more might enjoy the fine books written on the subject by Brian Sibley, Lyle Dorsett, and Douglas Gresham. Joy and Jack’s story has also received a semihistorical treatment in Shadowlands, which was first a BBC television film starring Joss Ackland and Claire Bloom, then a stage play, and finally a major motion picture with Anthony Hopkins playing Jack and Debra Winger starring as Joy.
Lewis’s experience late in life of a great love and a great loss had a profound effect on his spiritual journey, and so several aspects of it bear looking into here.
In the foreword he wrote for Jack’s Life, Christopher Mitchell notes that the Hollywood film Shadowlands gives the impression that, before meeting Joy, Lewis had no contact with women and little experience of deep emotions. Mitchell rightly points out:
One of the most persistent misperceptions about the man C. S. Lewis is that for the greater part of his life he lived safely cloistered away from the typical cares and burdens of normal everyday life. . . . According to the movie, it is not until Joy Gresham comes into his life that he is thrust out from underneath the shadows of Oxford’s spires into the bright light of real living. Such a portrayal is troubling simply because it is not true. (iv)
That said, the time that Lewis had with Joy undoubtedly provided him with a depth of love he had never known before. In A Grief Observed, Lewis reports that during their time together they “feasted on love, every mode of it—solemn and merry, romantic and realistic, sometimes as dramatic as a thunderstorm, sometimes as comfortable and unemphatic as putting on your soft slippers” (23–24).
The definitive three-volume set of Jack’s letters, The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, totals nearly four thousand pages. Edited by Walter Hooper and released in successive volumes between 2000 and 2007, the series greatly adds to the material available in the earlier Letters of C. S. Lewis, which came out in 1966. Of the thousands of letters Hooper provides in the three massive volumes, many of them available for the first time, there is a very special one that is missing. Actually, there are two letters that would be wonderful to have.
On January 10, 1950—we know this was the date because Warnie mentions it after the fact in his diary—Jack received his first letter from an American fan who signed her name as Mrs. W. L. Gresham. After receiving this letter, Jack wrote her back.
While we do not have either of these letters, we do have one that Joy dashed off to Chad Walsh on January 29, 1950. Walsh had previously encouraged her to write Jack with some points she had wanted to raise. In Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman, we find Joy’s reaction to receiving her first letter from Jack.
Just got a letter from Lewis in the mail. I think I told you I’d raised an argument or two on some points? Lord, he knocked my props out from under me unerringly; one shot to a pigeon. I haven’t a scrap of my case left. And what’s more, I’ve seldom enjoyed anything more. Being disposed of so neatly by a master of debate, all fair and square—it seems to be one of the great pleasures of life, though I’d never have suspected it in my arrogant youth. I suppose it’s unfair tricks of arguments that leave wounds. But after the sort of thing that Lewis does, what I feel is a craftsman’s joy at the sight of a superior performance. (116)
In this short passage we see aspects that would be characteristic of Joy—her quick wit, her love of heated discussion, and her passion for truth.
According to biographer Lyle Dorsett, Joy’s first visit to England, in 1952, was made for a number of reasons: marital problems with her husband, Bill, who had a history of alcoholism and infidelity; a desire for time alone to complete the manuscript of a book she was working on; the need for physical rest after an extended illness; and her wish to meet the man whose writing had played an influential role in her conversion and with whom she had been corresponding.
Jack and Joy met for the first time on September 24, 1952, in the dining room of the Eastgate Hotel on Oxford’s High Street. Joy had been staying in London with a friend and had invited Lewis to join the two of them for lunch. Lewis accepted and then returned the favor by inviting the two women to lunch in his rooms at Magdalen. George Sayer, who became the fourth member of this second meeting when Warnie withdrew, reports that the gathering was a “decided success” and remembers that there was stimulating conversation and roaring laughter (352).
Joy Davidman had made a favorable impression on Jack, and soon he asked her back to his college to meet Warnie and some of his colleagues. In his diary, Warnie notes that he found Joy to be “quite extraordinarily uninhibited” and records, “I was some little time in making up my mind about her” (273). Warnie goes on to say that during Joy’s initial visit to England, the three of them had “many merry days together” and a “rapid friendship developed”—and it is clear he is referring not just to Jack’s friendship with Joy but his own as well. Warnie concludes by noting that when she left, it was with “common regrets, and a sincere hope that we would meet again.”
The three friends did meet again, perhaps sooner than they had expected. While Joy was in England, her husband was having an affair with her cousin and had also begun drinking heavily again. In December 1953, Joy moved to England with her two young sons, David and Douglas. Her divorce was finalized the following August.
For reasons unknown, Joy was unable to renew her visitor’s visa. Perhaps her former membership in the Communist Party had come up. Perhaps the authorities at the Home Office were concerned about her financial status—she was living cheaply, with sporadic child support. She was also receiving assistance from the charitable fund Lewis had established. Rather than see her and the boys return to a situation in the States that was uncertain at best, Jack proposed a civil marriage that would allow them to remain in England. On April 23, 1956, Joy and Jack were wed at the Oxford registry office. Jack saw this as a legal marriage of mercy, a formality, a matter of expediency and friendship—not the sacrament recognized by the church.
Jack told only a few close friends about the new legal arrangement—Tolkien was not one of them—and expected that both their lives would go on as before, with Joy continuing to live at the house she had rented on Old High Street in Headington.
But their lives did not go on as before. Gradually, it became clear that their love was not a formality. It continued to grow. Unfortunately, at the same time there was something else that was growing. Just six months later, Joy was admitted to the hospital after a fall where her leg bone simply gave out. She was informed that what she had was not just a broken femur but an advanced cancer which had spread throughout her body. Despite a series of operations, Joy’s doctors gave her only a few weeks or months to live. She was forty-one.
Even without Joy’s disease, it is likely that Jack would have eventually proposed for real. Her desperate condition helped him to see sooner what those close to them already knew: that he was a man as in love as a man could be. On March 21, 1957, Joy received what everyone thought was a dying wish. With Warnie and one of the nursing sisters as witnesses, she and Jack were married in her hospital room by the Reverend Peter Bide, one of Jack’s former pupils. In the eyes of the church, they promised to be faithful in sickness and in health and to love and cherish one another until they were parted by death. As a priest, Bide had witnessed several cases of miraculous healing after he had laid hands on the sick and prayed for them. After administrating the sacraments of Holy Matrimony and Holy Communion, he offered a similar prayer on Joy’s behalf.
The entry we find for this day in Warnie’s diary records the following:
One of the most painful days of my life. Sentence of death has been passed on Joy and the end is only a matter of time. But today she had one little gleam of happiness. . . . At 11 a.m. we all gathered in Joy’s room at the Wingfield—Bide, Jack, sister, and myself, communicated, 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 Jack; though to feel pity for anyone so magnificently brave as Joy is almost an insult. She is to be moved here next week. . . . There seems little left to hope but that there may be no pain at the end. (274–75)
Several days later, Joy was carefully transported by ambulance to the Kilns. Declaring that there was nothing more they could do, her doctors had agreed she could be allowed to go home to die.
And then Jack—and all those praying for Joy—received the miracle that had not come fifty years earlier when a nine-year-old boy in Belfast had prayed for a similarly cancer-stricken mother.
After recording the entry for March 21, 1957—perhaps because the sorrow was too great and the events that followed too marvelous—Warnie closed the cover on his diary, and we find a large gap. The next entry is dated November 13, 1958. After reading over the words he had set down eighteen months earlier, Warnie put pen to paper once more, writing: “The last entry makes curious reading now when Joy is busy in the kitchen cooking our dinner. A recovery which was in the truest sense a miracle—admitted to be such by the doctors” (275).
After being sent home to die, Joy instead began to recover—slowly but surely. And she continued to recover. In time, Joy was strong enough to walk with a cane. Then later, as noted by Warnie, she was up and cooking for the three of them. Soon Joy was overseeing a number of major repairs and redecoration projects at the Kilns, work that the brothers had put off for years.
Jack’s account of what happened can be found in several places. In “The Efficacy of Prayer,” published in January 1959, we find this semiveiled report:
I have stood by the bedside of a woman whose thighbone was eaten with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well. It took three people to move her in bed. The doctors predicted a few months of life; the nurses (who often know better), a few weeks. A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying, “These bones are as solid as rock. It’s miraculous.” (3–4)
In a letter written to his friend Sister Penelope on November 6, 1957, Lewis provides a more personal narrative, noting that when Joy was sent home, everyone believed she was close to death.
Then it began to appear that the cancer had been arrested: the diseased spots in the bones were no longer spreading or multiplying. Then the tide began to turn—they were disappearing. New bone was being made. And so little by little till the woman who could hardly be moved in bed can now walk about the house and into the garden—limping and with a stick, but walking. (Letters of C. S. Lewis, 470)
Lewis goes on to report that his own bones had started losing calcium “just about as fast as Joy was gaining it.” Charles Williams had introduced Jack to the concept of Christian substitution, literally one Christian taking on and bearing the burdens of another. Lewis believed that God had allowed him to bear some of Joy’s suffering. Though the osteoporosis that Jack developed during the time Joy was recovering became less painful, it was a condition that remained with him the rest of his life.
Following Joy’s recovery, she and Jack experienced real happiness for the better part of two and a half years, taking trips to both Ireland and Greece—the former being the occasion for their first ride in an airplane, which, after a moment of initial terror, they both found exhilarating.
But Joy’s cancer came back, and she died three months after the trip to Greece, on July 13, 1960. Following her wishes, the funeral was held at Oxford Crematorium, and her ashes were scattered in its garden. The service was conducted by the Reverend Austin Farrer. He and his wife, Kay, had been among the first friends Joy made after moving to Oxford, and it was they who had gotten Joy to the hospital the night her leg had snapped. Now, as he and Kay stood alongside Jack, Warnie, Douglas, and David, Reverend Farrer offered words of gratitude from the Order for the Burial of the Dead found in the Book of Common Prayer.
“We give thee hearty thanks,” Farrer prayed, “for that it hath pleased thee to deliver this our sister out of the miseries of this sinful world. . . .”
Joy’s painful miseries were finally over.
In his memoir, Warnie offers a recollection of the woman who for a time became not only his sister-in-law but also a dear friend.
For me, Jack’s marriage meant that our home was enriched and enlivened by the presence of a witty, broad-minded, well-read and tolerant Christian, whom I had rarely heard equaled as a conversationalist and whose company was a never-ending source of enjoyment. . . . It would be an impertinence for me to compare my own sorrow at her death with his: nevertheless, I still continue to miss her sadly. (44–45)
Chapter 21 in George Sayer’s biography is titled “Inspired by Joy.” There Sayer discusses four books that Joy not only inspired or helped refine but also, in some cases, helped edit and type: Till We Have Faces, The Four Loves, Reflections on the Psalms, and A Grief Observed. It is to this final work that we now turn to further trace Lewis’s spiritual journey.
The title A Grief Observed is telling for a number of reasons. First, as Douglas Gresham tells us in the foreword, we should not overlook the indefinite article at the beginning of the title indicating that these are the observations of one man’s specific grief, a real grief. Gresham points out that anything titled Grief Observed would have to be “so general and nonspecific as to be academic in its approach and thus of little use to anyone approaching or experiencing bereavement” (6). Second, this is a grief observed. In this slender volume, we do not have the edited or revised afterthoughts of someone long after grief has subsided, but the actual observations of someone as he experiences each of grief’s agonizing stages.
“What many of us discover in this outpouring of anguish,” Gresham concludes, “is that we know exactly what he is talking about. Those of us who have walked this same path, or are walking it as we read this book, find that we are not, after all, as alone as we thought” (15).
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing” (19). So begins Lewis’s rawest and most heart-wrenching work.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
A Grief Observed opens with anguish. It will end on a very different note.
The facts behind the book’s creation are well known. At times incapacitated by grief in the days immediately following Joy’s death, Jack turned to recording his thoughts and feelings in a series of four examination books he found lying about the Kilns. Throughout his observations, he refers to Joy as H.—which stood for Helen, a first name she rarely used. When the fourth manuscript book was filled several weeks later, Lewis considered the project finished.
Though not originally intending to publish the writings but only intending to help himself come to terms with his bereavement, Lewis was convinced to publish his observations in 1961, though he did so anonymously under the pen name of N. W. Clerk. The initials came from the Anglo-Saxon nat whilk, which translates “I know not whom,” and thus the full name conveys, “I know not which clerk wrote this.” After Lewis’s death, the publishers asked and received permission to release the book under Lewis’s own name, knowing that by doing so it would reach and comfort more people.
The book’s four sections reflect the four manuscript books. In the following passage from the start of chapter 4, Lewis tells something of his intentions and some of what he has learned:
This is the fourth—and the last—empty ms. book I can find. . . . I resolve to let this limit my jottings. I will not start buying books for the purpose. In so far as this record was a defense against total collapse, a safety-valve, it has done some good. The other end I had in view turns out to have been based on a misunderstanding. I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. (76)
In between Lewis’s opening statement of how his grief felt so like fear and his statement here at the start of the fourth section that his writing has done some good, we find a record of anger, doubts, questions, and accusations—outbursts which, Lewis admits, were not thoughts so much as attempts to hit back. Again and again, we find Lewis disagreeing with some response he had just given voice to. For example, at the start of chapter 2 he writes: “For the first time I have looked back and read these notes. They appall me. From the way I’ve been talking anyone would think that H.’s death mattered chiefly for its effect on myself” (33). Toward the end of the chapter, he stops again and comments: “I wrote that last night. It was a yell rather than a thought” (47).
But Jack did not edit out his appalling statements or those passages where he was just yelling.
Long before the rest of the counseling world came to fully recognize the point, Lewis shows us that these responses are a valid and, for many, a necessary part of grieving and so must remain. In fact, one of the greatest contributions of Lewis’s account of grief is its testimony that pain, anger, doubt, and despair are normal and natural reactions to loss, feelings that should not be denied or repressed but recognized, expressed, and lived through. Lewis demonstrates how no stage in the process can be ignored if one is to successfully make it through the process of grieving and come out the other side.
Two decades earlier, in The Problem of Pain, Lewis had written: “If God is wiser than we His judgment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil” (33). But, Lewis continued, when we say that God is good, by good we cannot mean the complete reverse or something wholly other than what we normally mean.
“The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours,” Lewis concluded, “but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel” (35).
As Jack encountered and charted the pain of Joy’s death, not as a theoretical or intellectual problem but one that confronted him personally and directly, his faith was put to the test. He did not question God’s existence or that God was good—these he continued to affirm. Instead, he questioned the quality of this divine goodness. If God’s goodness is such that it could not be discerned amid Joy’s suffering and death and the anguish Jack felt, then what kind of goodness was it? Early in chapter 1 of A Grief Observed, Lewis writes:
Meanwhile, where is God? . . . When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. (22)
Throughout A Grief Observed, Lewis turns again and again to metaphor as the only way to express his powerful feelings. Here he feels as though God has retreated behind a shut and locked door. In another place Lewis compares humans to rats in a laboratory experiment. Later he wonders whether his faith was only a house of cards that could be knocked down at the first blow.
In chapter 3, Lewis comes to a turning point. As he wrestles with God’s sometimes-difficult-to-understand goodness, he states, “But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector” (57). Lewis notes that a cat—and he had owned a number of them—will spit and growl and even try to bite back as the veterinarian tries to administer the very treatment that is going to deliver it from its ailments and bring about healing. The cat, in its limited understanding, does not see that what the vet is doing is for its good. This does not mean that the vet is not good.
In the end, Lewis did not lose his faith following Joy’s death—as some have claimed. In the end, he found a peace which was comprehensible as well as a peace which passed understanding.
“You can’t see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears,” Lewis concludes (63). The very intensity of the anguish pulls down a heavy curtain. This is a concept Lewis says he can make sense of. “I have gradually been coming to feel that the door is no longer shut and bolted,” he goes on to note. “Was it my own frantic need that slammed it in my face?” Lewis suggests it was and that perhaps his yelling had drowned out the voice he was hoping to hear. He concludes, “You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give.”
To this insight about grief—that a person must have a capacity to receive before God can give—Lewis adds another. Several pages later he records: “The notes have been about myself, and about H., and about God. In that order. The order and the proportions exactly what they ought not to have been” (79). If the way into grief began with a focus first on his own needs and his own pain, Lewis maintains that once this stage has passed, the way out must reverse this focus. Here, fifteen pages before the end of A Grief Observed, Lewis has come to the point where praise—not yelling or trying to hit back—has become the best source of relief. And this praise must take a certain form: first praise of God as the giver, and then praise of Joy as the gift. Lewis concludes, “I must do more of this.”
This is not to say that his own needs are not to be considered at all. Lewis adds one further insight which may seem more commonplace but which the counseling world has come to see the validity of as well. He reports that his heart was feeling lighter than it had been for a number of weeks. Lewis attributes this lightening to simply paying better attention to his physical well-being: “I am recovering physically from a good deal of mere exhaustion,” he notes after having a particularly healthy day and a sound night’s sleep (62).
Near the end of The Last Battle, Tirian enters the stable only to find it is nothing like he expected. Instead of being in a small, dark, enclosing space, he finds himself on a wide, grassy plain bathed in light. A gentle breeze is blowing. And, perhaps most astonishing, Tirian hears a voice and turns around to discover he is surrounded by friends. By contrast, the dwarves who are also there are able to perceive none of this.
In the concluding chapter of A Grief Observed, Lewis tells of an experience quite similar to the one depicted in The Last Battle—with his own position being somewhere in between that of Tirian, who can see all that is there, and the dwarves, who can see nothing. Here, as in other times when Lewis describes a mystical experience, we must turn to his own words.
One moment last night can be described in similes; otherwise it won’t go into language at all. Imagine a man in total darkness. He thinks he is in a cellar or dungeon. Then there comes a sound. He thinks it might be a sound from far off—waves or wind-blown trees or cattle half a mile away. And if so, it proves he’s not in a cellar, but free, in the open air. Or it may be a much smaller sound close at hand—a chuckle of laughter. And if so, there is a friend just beside him in the dark. Either way, a good, good sound. (81)
Jack did not lose his faith after Joy’s death, but neither did he get all his questions answered. But it was in the way his questions about God’s goodness, Joy’s suffering, and his own pain were not answered that Jack came to a resolution. He explains:
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “No answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, “Peace, child, you don’t understand.” (86–87)
A page later, Lewis speculates that all his questions about the problem of pain ultimately will not be resolved by some subtle reconciliation between what seem to be contradictory notions. He senses instead that “some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer” (89).
Instead, Lewis proposes, in the end we shall see that there never was any problem.
Earlier it was suggested that in the darkness of heartache that descended on Jack after Joy’s death, he found himself in a position between that of Tirian and that of the dwarves. But in truth, Jack’s position was much closer to Tirian’s. Unlike the dwarves, Jack was aware that there was more to reality than he was able to perceive and that this something more was characterized by a great goodness.
In the final paragraph of A Grief Observed, Jack writes: “How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me” (94).
And so Lewis’s observations of a grief that initially felt so like fear end in peace—peace and an unlocked door, a compassionate gaze, a friend beside him in the dark, and a good, good sound like the sound of laughter.
In the serene acceptance we find at the end of A Grief Observed, Lewis also affirms the position he had described just months earlier in The Four Loves. There he explains:
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. (121)
Lewis then concludes by charting the opposite course—not the safe path but our proper one: “We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him” (122).
And this is just what Jack did.
After telling us, “She smiled, but not at me,” Lewis chooses to end A Grief Observed with a sentence taken from one of the final cantos of the Paradiso: “Poi si torno all’ eternal fontana.” Here Dante’s beloved Beatrice turns away from him and towards the glory of God. Then she turned back to the Eternal Fountain. Jack finally lets go of his Helen Joy. But how is he able to do this? How is this even possible? Jack can let go because he knows, truly knows, that he is letting her go into the hands of God, who is the everlasting source of living water.
Earlier Lewis commented that his notes had been about himself, about Joy, and about God—in an order and proportion exactly the opposite of what they ought to have been. Then she turned back to the Eternal Fountain. Jack does not include himself in the final sentence at all. It begins with Joy and ends with God. Jack finally has the order right. And now that he has the order right, he can let go. This letting go, this acceptance of Joy’s death, will not be an end to the burden of grief. But now the burden is bearable.
Brother Once More
In “Life After Joy,” the final chapter of his biography, George Sayer reports that for a period of about eleven months—before Jack’s own health began to fail—Jack’s outward life in many ways returned to normal. There was work to do at Cambridge during the week, and weekends and holidays to spend at the Kilns with Warnie. There were still endless letters to answer and two books yet to write. During this period, Jack continued to make time for regular meetings with his Oxford friends. Sayer notes that Jack was now more willing than before to be dependent on these friends, more willing to accept invitations for lunch or dinner or for a drive in the country.
A Grief Observed was published in Britain in September 1961. Following close on its heels a month later was a book of literary scholarship, An Experiment in Criticism. Jack would write only one more book about his faith during his lifetime, and it would not come out until after his death.
In C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, Walter Hooper includes part of a letter Jack received from Jocelyn Gibb dated June 13, 1963. Gibb had written to say the typed copy of Lewis’s recently completed book had arrived. “This . . . has knocked me flat,” Gibb declares. “Not quite; I can just sit up and shout hurrah, and again hurrah. It’s the best you’ve done since The Problem of Pain. By Jove, this is something of a present to a publisher!” (380).
The book Gibb had received was Letters to Malcolm. As Hooper rightly notes, it is one of Lewis’s “most outstanding works on Christian apologetics” (380).
Letters to Malcolm differs from Lewis’s previous writing in several respects. First, although Hooper lists it among Lewis’s apologetic works, with Lewis’s creation of several imaginary characters—Malcolm; his wife, Betty; and their son, George—it is also a work of fiction, the only work where Lewis can be said to have combined reason and imagination in equal portions.
Second, if we exclude A Grief Observed from the list, Letters to Malcolm is also the only work where Lewis does not assume anything like the stance of an expert. In a letter to Gibb about the blurb that was to appear on the cover, Lewis requested, “I’d like you to make the point that the reader is merely being allowed to listen to two very ordinary laymen discussing the practical and speculative problems of prayer as these appear to them” (CLIII, 1434). Peter Schakel has proposed that Lewis’s use of a letter format was strategically chosen to remove him from a position of authority: “He is not an ‘expert’ qualified to deliver talks on the BBC, or a scholar who has worked out a carefully reasoned defense of the possibility of miracle. These are just ‘letters’” (175).
How, specifically, did Jack’s experience of grief affect his writing in Letters to Malcolm? Alan Jacobs comments: “It is certainly different from his other books on Christianity, and the chief difference is the number of questions it contains: question marks are scattered through the book like confetti. He raises far more puzzles than he can solve—more, one might say, than he is inclined to solve” (292).
The abundance of questions throughout Letters to Malcolm reveals an openness Lewis now possessed in greater measure than before—a greater openness to mystery, a greater openness to ideas and opinions different from his own, and (to use Jewel’s phrase in The Last Battle) a greater openness to take whatever adventure Aslan would send.
In the second letter, Lewis turns to a discussion of Rose Macaulay, the English author who was in the habit of collecting ready-made prayers, prayers which had been written by other people which she would then use for prayer herself. Lewis writes to Malcolm that although her method would not do for either of them, he is sure Macaulay’s method was the right one for her.
“Broaden your mind, Malcolm,” Lewis tells his fictional correspondent. “Broaden your mind! It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church” (10). He then uses the opportunity to launch into a description of a Greek Orthodox service he had attended.
What pleased me most . . . was that there seemed to be no prescribed behavior for the congregation. Some stood, some knelt, some sat, some walked; one crawled about the floor like a caterpillar. And the beauty of it was that nobody took the slightest notice of what anyone else was doing. I wish we Anglicans would follow their example.
Lewis shows a different kind of openness in talking about the Lord’s Supper in letter 19. When it comes to what happens in the moment of receiving the bread and wine, Lewis confesses to a complete lack of comprehension.
However, then, it may be for others, for me the something that holds together and “informs” all the objects, words, and actions of this rite is unknown and unimaginable. I am not saying to anyone in the world, “Your explanation is wrong.” I am saying, “Your explanation leaves the mystery for me still a mystery.” (102–3)
Lewis makes it clear that he not only is comfortable with this mystery but also prefers to leave it this way. To do otherwise, for him, would be like taking a burning coal out of the fire to analyze it. The examination quickly turns a live coal into a dead one. Lewis points out, “The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand” (104).
On the final page of Letters to Malcolm, Lewis reveals that he would have no problem should any of his statements later be shown to be in error—and this is another kind of openness which he now embraced to a greater degree. “Guesses, of course, only guesses,” he humbly writes. “If they are not true, something better will be” (124).
Writing the book just months before his death, Jack was at that time afflicted by osteoporosis, a weak heart, an enlarged prostate, and failing kidneys. There were occasions when he had to wear a corset-like surgical belt for his back and to use a catheter, as he put it, for the plumbing. For a time, he was also told he could not go up stairs. Later he was permitted to climb them but only at the slowest pace, or in bottom gear, as he put it.
Yet Lewis seemed to embrace it all as the adventure that was sent to him. He closes Letters to Malcolm in glad acceptance: “Thank Betty for her note,” he tells the fictional Malcolm. “I’ll come by the later train, the 3:40. And tell her not to bother about a bed on the ground floor, I can manage stairs again now, provided I take them ‘in bottom.’ Till Saturday” (124).
There would be just one more adventure for Jack. And he would accept this one as well.
Warnie writes near the end of his memoir that in these days of living at the Kilns after Joy’s death, he felt as though the wheel had come full circle. It was not he, Jack, and Mrs. Moore—as it had been from the end of the Great War until 1950, when she was admitted to the nursing home. It was not he, Jack, and Joy—as it had been from their first days of friendship in late 1952 until her death eight years later. Now it was just he and Jack—together once more as they had been long ago in the little end room of the attic at Little Lea.
Warnie also reports that his brother faced his approaching death calmly and that his last weeks were not unhappy. “I have done all I wanted to do,” Jack said to him one evening. “And I’m ready to go” (45).
Friday, November 22, 1963, began much like previous days, Warnie tells us, with breakfast, a few letters, and the morning crossword puzzle. After lunch, Jack fell asleep in his chair, and Warnie suggested that he would be more comfortable if he moved to the downstairs bed which had been set up for him. At four came tea and a few words between the brothers, and then, around five thirty, the end.