At the dissolution of the family home in Belfast an enormous mass of diaries, letters and other papers relating to the Lewis and Hamilton families came to light. Albert Lewis rarely threw anything away and, though the papers were not arranged into any semblance of order, Warnie saw in them the kernel of a family history; shortly after his temporary retirement from the Army in December 1930, he set about arranging and editing them. He spent, all told, several years typing the 3,563 pages that make up the eleven volumes of ‘Lewis Papers’, covering the period 1850–1930.
By the middle of September 1931, Warnie had got as far with the family memoirs as 1915. Lewis then asked Arthur Greeves if he might borrow the letters he had written to him, promising that his brother should not see those that dealt with ‘It’ – the name he and Arthur gave to Joy as well as the name they used for sex.
While vetting the 160 letters he had written to Arthur Greeves for inclusion in the family papers, Lewis came, as it were, face to face with his past. He was surprised to discover what a large percentage of the letters were about the pleasure ‘Joy’ had given him and – now that he was a Christian – with what assiduity he had followed the wrong track in discovering its source. The benefits he gained from this review of his life were summarized in a letter to Arthur on 1 October 1931.
To me, as I re-read them, the most striking thing is their egotism: sometimes in the form of priggery, intellectual and even social: often in the form of downright affectation (I seem to be posturing and showing off in every letter) … How ironical that the very things which I was proud of in my letters then should make the reading of them a humiliation to me now! Don’t suppose from this that I have not enjoyed the other aspects of them – the glorious memories they call up. I think I have got over wishing for the past back again. I look at it this way. The delights of those days were given to lure us into the world of the Spirit, as sexual rapture is there to lead to offspring and family life. They were nuptial ardours. To ask that they should return, or should remain, is like wishing to prolong the honeymoon at an age when a man should rather be interested in the careers of his growing sons. They have done their work, those days and led on to better things.1
One thing which puzzled Arthur about Jack’s conversion was that the spontaneous appeal of the Christian story continued to be so much less to him than that of paganism. He asked if this might be due, in the main, to Jack’s upbringing in Protestant Ulster and man’s basic imperfection. Lewis agreed that these might have something to do with it, but felt that the chief cause lay elsewhere, possibly in the fact that paganism had furnished him with the initial ‘sweetness’ which he had needed to start him on the spiritual life.
Though his Grandfather Hamilton had been an evangelical churchman who never tired of deprecating the Catholic Church from his pulpit, Lewis does not appear to have shared these sentiments except during his two years at Wynyard School when he affected disgust at the High Church practices of St John’s Church in Watford. Indeed, from the time of his conversion to the end of his life, Lewis achieved the rare and seldom-attempted feat of avoiding any show of partisanship. At the same time, however, he distrusted the various manifestations of liberalism (or ‘Christianity-and-water’ as he came to call it) and any attempt to forge an intellectual or political party out of Christianity.
Later, when his theological works began to appear, many of his critics confused his strong emphasis on ‘salvationism’ with modern Puritanism. But Lewis had long been aware of the negative and joyless elements in Puritanism – had indeed seen how they affected Arthur Greeves. The Greeves family had traditionally been Quakers. However, when Arthur was about twelve his father, Joseph, became a member of the Plymouth Brethren and had the entire family baptized in the bathtub. Joseph’s face, said Lewis, ‘was timid, prim, sour, at once oppressed and oppressive. He was a harsh husband and a despotic father … My own father described his funeral as “the most cheerful funeral he ever attended”.’2 Now, writing to Arthur on 6 December 1931, Lewis explained why he distrusted the Ulster brand of Christianity:
I feel that I can say with absolute certainty that if you ever feel that the whole spirit and system in which you were brought up was, after all, right and good, then you may be quite sure that that feeling is a mistake … My reasons for this are 1. That the system denied pleasures to others as well as to the votaries themselves: whatever the merits of self-denial, this is unpardonable interference. 2. It inconsistently kept some worldly pleasures, and always selected the worst ones – gluttony, avarice, etc. 3. It was ignorant. It could give no ‘reason for the faith that was in it’.3 Your relations have been found very ill grounded in the Bible itself and as ignorant as savages of the historical and theological reading needed to make the Bible more than a superstition. 4. ‘By their fruits ye shall know them.’4 Have they the marks of peace, love, wisdom and humility on their faces or in their conversation? Really, you need not bother about that kind of Puritanism. It is simply the form which the memory of Christianity takes just before it finally dies away altogether in a commercial community: just as extreme emotional ritualism is the form it takes on just before it dies in a fashionable community.5
Shortly after their memorable visit to Whipsnade in September 1931, Warnie re-enlisted for a tour of duty in China so that he could retire earlier than originally planned. Jack felt very acutely the loss of his company, not only at The Kilns, but in Magdalen as well. Since Warnie’s temporary retirement in December 1930, Jack had shared his college rooms with his brother and whenever he was not engaged in tutorials or other work they were usually to be found together and enjoying the same circle of friends.
Though Lewis spent all his weekends and vacations at The Kilns, he stayed most nights in Magdalen during term. This meant that he and Mrs Moore saw each other less frequently than in the old days. Besides this, his literary and theological interests took him more and more into the company of friends such as Tolkien, Barfield, Coghill and Dyson whom it was more convenient to meet in college. As the old tradition of having friends home for tea began to disappear, Mrs Moore – now in her fifty-eighth year – saw little, if anything, of those friends Lewis had made since they moved to The Kilns. Fortunately for her, Mrs Moore had much else to occupy her. Besides eight acres of land – even if only a small part of it was ever under cultivation – she had to superintend the cooking and the running of a ten-room house, although she had a succession of maids to help her.
The move to The Kilns had not long been completed before a gardener and general factotum was found to care for the vegetable garden, the greenhouse and the several acres of apple orchard that lay in front of the house. This was Fred Paxford,* who was the same age as Lewis and who lived in a small wooden bungalow on the other side of the old brick-kilns. Paxford, who was born in the nearby village of Fifield, was a countryman of immense integrity and surely one of the most unorthodox gardeners in the world. He was a great favourite with Mrs Moore and, unless she made him do otherwise, slept till mid-morning and went to bed long after the rest of the household was asleep.
Though an optimist at heart, Paxford was given to gloomy prognostications and hymn-singing which, quite unbeknown to him, was sometimes so loud that it could be heard by those who lived near The Kilns. Once when Mrs Moore was confined to bed for some weeks, she called Paxford to her bedside and taught him the rudiments of cooking. Thereafter, he was able to prepare a very tolerable meal though, as Walter Hooper observed when he lived there, the dinners cooked by Paxford were often served up to the accompaniment of ‘Abide with Me’, uttered with so much feeling that every dish on the table rattled.
This unusual gardener was also entrusted with the daily shopping. Though generous to a fault with his own money, he was intent on cutting The Kilns’ household expenses to a minimum by a most uncomfortable economy. He absolutely refused to buy tea or sugar till he had searched the larder and was convinced that the last spoonful had been used. Perhaps the most distinctive of Paxford’s attributes was his ability to ‘hold things together with a nail and a piece of string’. Once when a pane of glass in Warnie’s study was broken, he replaced it with one he could find no other use for: it was opaque and remained there as an eyesore for the rest of their lives. Though Paxford was almost fanatically attached to Mrs Moore, his second loyalty was to Lewis – or ‘Mr Jack’ as he called him – whom he served as a devoted friend and servant till the latter’s death.
The greenhouse was Paxford’s private domain and few people, excepting Mrs Moore, were allowed inside. There he raised some beautiful fruits and vegetables, few of which reached the table as they were allowed to reach such perfection that most eventually rotted where they grew. One day when Hooper was staying in The Kilns Lewis took him to see the greenhouse. Through the door they could see a tomato vine, at the top of which was one large red tomato. Lewis loved tomatoes, and he tried to open the door. Paxford kept it locked. While they were gazing at the tomato it fell to the ground and burst. The next moment Paxford appeared. He had seen the whole thing. ‘Well, Mr Jack,’ he said. ‘I reckon it was a good thing I locked that door. You see, Mr Jack, you might have gone in and got that tomato when it was green. That green tomato would have made you very ill, Sir, very ill indeed. So I reckon you’ve been very lucky, Sir, I really do.’ Lewis told Hooper that Paxford, a lovable pessimist, was his model for Puddleglum the Marshwiggle who appears in The Silver Chair.
As Mrs Moore was very kind to animals, The Kilns became a fashionable retreat for stray dogs and cats. Chief among her pets was the dog Mr Papworth, who was somewhat mixed in breed, but predominantly a terrier. Though he never made an elaborate fuss over them, Lewis liked dogs too and Mr Papworth accompanied the family on all their holidays. Mr Papworth, who died in 1937, became a bit curious in his old age – his chief oddity being that he would not eat if he were watched. Eventually it was discovered that the only way to get food inside him was by what might be called the Orpheus – Eurydice method. This required Lewis to walk down the village street with a bowl of food, followed by Mr Papworth who would eat whatever Lewis threw over his shoulder. What made this method ‘Orphean’ was that, should Lewis look round to see what was happening, Mr Papworth would give him a fierce look and ignore the food. Owen Barfield once followed behind the dog and watched, as did many amused villagers, Lewis feed Mr Papworth his peripatetic dinner.
During term, when Lewis spent the nights in college, he was called (with tea) at 7.15. After a bath and shave he usually had time for a few paces in Addison’s Walk before he went to Matins in Magdalen chapel at eight o’clock. From 8.15 to 8.25 he breakfasted in Common Room, after which he answered letters until his first pupil arrived at nine o’clock. His morning tutorials usually lasted from nine till one o’clock which, he complained, was too long a time for a man to ‘act the gramophone in’. At one o’clock Maureen collected him in the ‘family car’ and drove him home for lunch. The car had been acquired shortly after the move to The Kilns and, though it was usually driven by Maureen or Paxford, Lewis did at one time learn to manipulate the gears and get it moving. What stopped him was not a crash but, as he told Hooper, the universal agreement that he should not be allowed behind the wheel. Still, he did not mind this and was always delighted to be a passenger when someone else was driving.
Lewis was one of those rare people who enjoy almost every kind of weather, which, as he says in That Hideous Strength, is ‘a useful taste if one lives in England’.6 On most afternoons he took a long walk and, now that he lived at The Kilns, he could stretch his legs and potter about in his own wood. After tea he was driven back to college where he had pupils from 5 p.m. till 7 p.m. After dinner, which was at 7.15 p.m., he usually attended the undergraduate societies described in Chapter 3. Tuesday was an especially busy day as it included ‘Beer and Beowulf’ evenings, when those pupils reading Anglo-Saxon came to his rooms for instruction and beer.
The only exceptions to this rigorous programme were Saturdays when he had no pupils after tea and Mondays when he had none at all. He nevertheless went into college on Mondays as it had become a regular custom for Tolkien to drop in about mid-morning. From Lewis’s rooms they usually went to the Eastgate Hotel (just across the High Street from Magdalen) or to a nearby pub for a pint of beer. Writing to his brother on 22 November 1931 about these sessions, Lewis said: ‘We talk English School politics: sometimes we criticise one another’s poems: other days we drift into theology or “the state of the nation”; rarely we fly no higher than bawdy and “puns”.’7
By ‘bawdy’ Lewis did not mean what are commonly called ‘dirty stories’. He disliked stories containing smut or which bordered on the blasphemous, and when they were told in his presence he did not disguise his annoyance. By his own definition, bawdy ought to be outrageous and extravagant but it must not have anything cruel or pornographic about it. One example of Lewis’s taste in bawdy is a story he once told Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss about a Bishop of Exeter who was giving prizes at a girls’ school. ‘They did a performance’, said Lewis, ‘of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the poor man stood up afterwards and made a speech and said (piping voice): “I was very interested in your delightful performance, and among other things I was very interested in seeing for the first time in my life a female Bottom.”’8
Excepting perhaps Hugo Dyson, Lewis was unrivalled at punning, and one of his students has recorded one of his most brilliant efforts. The occasion was a dinner-party at which one of the courses was a haggis, the national dish of Scotland, consisting of the blood and guts of sheep. Seated next to Lewis was a Portuguese dignitary who, while eating the haggis, remarked that he felt like a ‘gastronomic Columbus’. ‘The comparison is wayward in your case,’ replied Lewis. ‘Why not a vascular da Gama?’9
Since Dymer appeared in 1926, Lewis had published four book reviews in The Oxford Magazine and two letters in literary journals. Though The Allegory of Love was still being written, Lewis was anxious to air some of his literary views in print. On 3 March 1930 he read a paper to the Martlets on ‘The Personal Heresy in Poetics’ in which he attacked the notion that poetry is the ‘expression of personality’ and is useful for putting us into contact with the ‘poet’s soul’: in short, that a poet’s ‘Life’ and ‘Works’ are two diverse expressions of a single quiddity.
Two writers whom he accused of being specially guilty of the ‘personal heresy’ were E.M.W. Tillyard (1889–1962) in his book on Milton (1930), and T.S. Eliot who in his essay on ‘Dante’ claimed that ‘The rage of Dante … the deep surge of Shakespeare’s general criticism and disillusionment, are merely gigantic attempts to metamorphose private failures and dis-appointments’.10 Lewis was confident that he could get the essay published in some orthodox literary journal but he wanted it to be seen by the ‘heretics’ themselves, to take a swipe at them on their own home ground. ‘Let it be granted’, Lewis said in the essay, ‘that I do approach the poet; at least I do it by sharing his consciousness, not by studying it.
I look with his eyes, not at him. He, for the moment, will be precisely what I do not see; for you can see any eyes rather than the pair you see with, and if you want to examine your own glasses you must take them off your nose. The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him; he is a man who says ‘look at that’ and points; the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him.11
Lewis offered the essay to T.S. Eliot for publication in The Criterion. Oddly enough, Eliot did not trouble to acknowledge it and, after six months’ waiting, Lewis wrote again on 19 April 1931 suggesting that, as he believed Eliot ‘had some sympathy with’ his ‘formal proof’ that poetry ‘never was nor could be the “expression of personality” save per accidens’, he might at least get round to accepting or rejecting the paper. ‘I do not’, he added, ‘wish by any pressure on you to reduce my own chances of reaching a public on a subject about which current views exasperate me beyond bearing.’12
It is regrettable that Lewis very rarely saved letters addressed to him. Even those few which missed the waste-paper basket survived because they were useful as book-markers. Our ignorance, then, of what was in Eliot’s letters is entirely owing to Lewis’s habit of eternally ‘tidying up’ his desk rather than any ill-will he may have felt towards the writer. Eliot, apparently, asked if he were writing other essays of a similar nature for Lewis said in a letter of 2 June 1931:
The essay does, as you have divined, form the first of a series of which I have all the materials to hand. The others would be 2. Objective Standards of Literary Merit. 3. Literature and Virtue (This is not a stylistic variant of ‘Art and Morality’: that is my whole point). 4. Literature and Knowledge. 5. Metaphor and Truth. The whole, when completed, would form a frontal attack on Crocean aesthetics and state a neo-Aristotelian theory of literature (not of Art, about which I say nothing) which inter alia will re-affirm the romantic doctrine of imagination as a truth-bearing faculty, though not quite as the romantics understood it.13
The ‘Personal Heresy’ essay got no further with Eliot than did Lewis’s ‘Eliotic’ poems of 1925 and was eventually returned. Having failed, then, to get into the columns of The Criterion, Lewis threw his energies into the more scholarly works he had in hand: The Allegory of Love and – an offshoot of it – an essay on ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Il Filostrato’, which appeared in Essays and Studies for 1932. The autumn of 1931 and the winter of 1932 turned out to be profitable months because, in writing the papers he mentioned to Eliot, Lewis found an opportunity for formulating and clarifying his ideas about literary criticism.
Still, the thing Lewis most wanted to say remained unsaid: the story of the ‘wanting and having’ experience of Joy that led to his conversion. He believed the experience to be common to most people and of almost universal interest. To recapitulate, up until 1929, when he became a theist, Lewis saw no conscious connection between Joy and God, and in the autobiographical poem written in 1922–3 he explained it as best he could. Second, he managed to convey the ecstatic aspect of Joy in the short poem, entitled ‘Joy’, published in The Beacon in 1924. His third attempt followed on the heels of his conversion to theism when he wrote the first draft of a prose autobiography – or ‘the prose It’ as he called it – which was discussed in the last chapter.
In the spring of 1932 he had another go at writing the story of Joy leading on to conversion. This, like the first attempt, was to be in the form of a long narrative poem. Only thirty-four lines of it have survived, in a letter written to Owen Barfield on 6 May 1932 in which he says, ‘I am not satisfied with any part I have yet written and the design is ludicrously ambitious. But I feel it will be several years anyway before I give it up.’ As Lewis had read most of G.K. Chesterton’s theological books by this time it does not seem fanciful to suppose that Lewis’s idea of a spiritual ‘voyage’ was based on an idea suggested by Chesterton in his book, Orthodoxy (1908). ‘I have often’, wrote Chesterton, ‘had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas … His mistake was really a most enviable mistake … What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating terrors of going abroad combined with all the humane security of coming home again.’14
This new verse autobiography, which Lewis included in the letter to Barfield of 6 May 1932, begins with an idea of his Chestertonian ‘voyage’:
I will write down the portion that I understand
Of twenty years wherein I went from land to land.
At many bays and harbours I put in with joy
Hoping that there I should have built my second Troy
And stayed. But either stealing harpies drove me thence,
Or the trees bled, or oracles, whose airy sense
I could not understand, yet must obey, once more
Sent me to sea to follow the retreating shore
Of this land which I call at last my home, where most
I feared to come; attempting not to find whose coast
I ranged half round the world, with fain design to shun
The last fear whence the last security is won.
Lewis wrote another 100 lines of this new autobiographical poem before he went on his annual spring walking tour with Barfield and Dom Bede Griffiths* shortly after Easter 1932. After this his tight schedule did not afford a break till 16 May when he and Barfield went to hear Wagner’s Siegfried at Covent Garden, and then he was overwhelmed with work till the end of July. As soon as he was free, he wrote – exhausted – to Arthur Greeves asking if he might be his house-guest in Belfast from 15 to 29 August.
After so many attempts to tell the story of his conversion, it sounds incredible to say that Lewis wrote his first full-length prose work, The Pilgrim’s Regress, during his fortnight’s holiday in Ireland. Nevertheless, we have it in his own words that he did. On 25 March 1933 he told Arthur that he wished to dedicate the book to him because, as he said, ‘It is yours by every right – written in your house, read to you as it was written.’15 After sending the manuscript to Barfield for criticism, Lewis wrote to him on 29 October 1932 saying that, because of his ‘long preparation by failure in the prose “It” and the autobiographical poem’ (the last one), the book ‘spurted out so suddenly’ that he had very little objective judgement of it.
In turning from a ‘voyage’ by sea to a journey by road, Lewis is of course imitating John Bunyan. In casting his story into the form of an allegory, he is not only following Bunyan but using a medieval technique for which his years of work on The Allegory of Love had eminently qualified him. The difficulty is that modern people, unfamiliar with allegory, seem to suppose that it is a code to be cracked. In allegory, Lewis explained in The Allegory of Love, you
represent what is immaterial in picturable terms … You can start with an immaterial fact, such as the passions which you actually experience, and can then invent visibilia [visible things] to express them. If you are hesitating between an angry retort and a soft answer, you can express your state of mind by inventing a person called Ira [Anger] with a torch and letting her contend with another invented person called Patientia [Patience]. This is allegory.16
Lewis found that the commonest mistake made about such an allegory as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress
comes from the pernicious habit of reading allegory as if it were a cryptogram to be translated; as if, having grasped what an image (as we say) ‘means’, we threw the image away and thought of the ingredient in real life which it represents. But that method leads you continually out of the book and back into the conception you started from and would have had without reading it. The right process is the exact reverse. We ought not to be thinking ‘This green valley, where the shepherd boy is singing, represents humility’; we ought to be discovering, as we read, that humility is like that green valley. That way, moving always into the book, not out of it, from the concept to the image, enriches the concept. And that is what allegory is for.17
Though he never used allegory in any of his later books (except, perhaps, for Father Time in The Last Battle), Lewis found in the case of The Pilgrim’s Regress that it provided a sudden release for what he wanted to say. In the verses attached to the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan says that while working on quite a different book, he ‘Fell suddenly into an Allegory’ and that once he had his ‘Method by the end; Still as I pull’d, it came’.
Not only did Lewis’s allegory ‘come’ as unimpeded as Bunyan’s, but he found it the perfect receptacle for describing his progress from ‘popular realism’ to Christianity and the particular part which Joy had played in it. He was, at the same time, spared from putting himself into the limelight as it is his pilgrim, John, who undergoes the journey. A number of Lewis’s recently composed religious poems, mentioned in the previous chapter, found their way into the narrative.
The central character in The Pilgrim’s Regress is the Pilgrim, John, a kind of Everyman. He is born in Puritania and grows up in fear of an unseen Landlord who is portrayed as a moral despot. John is beset by longings for an Island, which is both an enjoyment of, and a desire for, ‘Joy’. He first makes the mistake of supposing that the Island is a disguise for Lust. When this deception is unmasked, he sets off to find the Island. Along the way he meets people who are allegorical personifications of ideas and schools of thought Lewis had encountered over the years. Examples include Mr Enlightenment (who is nineteenth-century rationalism) and Sigismund (who is Freudianism).
John is eventually captured by the Spirit of the Age, who is portrayed as a giant whose eyes make everything he looks at transparent. When John is able to see his own insides (lungs, intestines, etc.), the giant attempts to persuade him that this is all a man is. John is rescued by Reason, who leads him as far as the Grand Canyon, on the other side of which is the continuation of the Main Road.
While wondering how to cross the Canyon, John meets Mother Kirk (the Church), who gives him an account of the Sin of Adam (the Grand Canyon). She explains that she is the only one who can carry him across the Canyon safely. He doesn’t trust her, and seeks another, much longer way. Turning north John meets ‘cerebral’ men such as Mr Sensible (cultured worldliness), and Mr Humanist. They talk as if they had ‘seen through’ things they’ve never seen at all. Finding he cannot get on to the Main Road this way, John turns south. After meeting Mr Broad, representing modernist religion, John becomes friends with Wisdom. From him John learns the inadequacy of many of the philosophies he had once found so attractive, such as Idealism, Materialism and Hegelianism.
On leaving Wisdom, John is helped by a Man (Christ), who tells him he must accept Grace or die. Having accepted Grace, John feels bound to acknowledge God’s existence. There follows a chapter in which Lewis repeats what he gave in the ‘Early Prose Joy’ as his main reason for not wanting to be a Christian. He wanted to call his soul his own. Now he realizes that to acknowledge the Lord he is ‘never to be alone; never the master of his own soul, to have no privacy, no corner whereof you can say to the whole universe: This is my own, here I can do as I please.’18
John stops for a while with History and in the chapter ‘History’s Words’ we find some of the most valuable ideas in the book. Lewis pointed out in the running commentary for the 1943 edition that ‘Morality is by no means God’s only witness in the sub-Christian world’,19 that even pagan mythology contained a ‘Divine call’. Thus, all men are given an imaginative ‘picture’ of the Island, which stirs up ‘sweet desire’ or Joy. However, the pagans (like Lewis at one time) mistook the ‘pictures’ and ‘desires’ for what they were not, and instead of turning to Mother Kirk became ‘corrupt in their imaginations’.20 On the other hand, the Landlord gave the Shepherds (the Jews), Laws and set their feet on a ‘Road’. But in the end, says History, neither is enough. ‘The truth is that a Shepherd is only half a man, and a Pagan is only half a man, so that neither people was well without the other, nor could either be healed until the Landlord’s Son came into the country.’21
In the chapter ‘Archetype and Ectype’ John asks Wisdom about the thing that had terrified Lewis when he learned he would have to obey God. ‘I am afraid’, says John, ‘that the things the Landlord really intends for me may be utterly unlike the things he has taught me to desire.’ ‘They will be very unlike the things you imagine,’ replies Wisdom. ‘But you already know that the objects which your desire imagines are always inadequate to that desire. Until you have it you will not know what you wanted.’22
John struggles to withdraw, but Reason will not allow it, and he returns to Mother Kirk. In the chapter entitled ‘Securus Te Projice’23 she tells him to dive to the bottom of a pool and come up on the other side. When he says he’s never learned to dive, she says, ‘The art of diving is not to do anything new but simply to cease doing something. You have only to let yourself go.’*24
John at last finds the Island of his dreams, and discovers that it is the other side of the Eastern Mountains he has known all his life, the home of God.
Before the book was vetted by Barfield, Lewis asked Arthur Greeves for his criticisms and Arthur suggested that the shower of Greek and Latin quotations either be translated or omitted. This Lewis was not prepared to do for, as he said in a letter of 17 December 1932, ‘one of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributory cause of atheism’.25 Arthur would also have had him aim at greater simplicity of meaning. Lewis argued that, though the spirit of man must ‘become humble and trustful like a child and, like a child, simple in motive’, Christ did not mean that the ‘processes of thought by which people become Christians must be childish processes. At any rate,’ he went on to say, ‘the intellectual side of my conversion was not simple and I can describe only what I know.’26
Arthur criticized as well Lewis’s style, urging him to be more ‘correct, classical and elaborate’.27 Lewis’s answer to this is very valuable for it shows that his intention was, from the first, to write simply and clearly. His later books are more readable, but even in The Pilgrim’s Regress it is obvious that he had a natural sensibility for idiom and the cadences of popular speech. ‘I aim’, he wrote to Arthur on 4 December 1932, ‘chiefly at being idiomatic and racy, basing myself on Malory, Bunyan, and Morris, tho’ without archaisms: and would usually prefer to use ten words, provided they are honest native words and idiomatically ordered, than one “literary word”. To put the thing in a nutshell you want “The man of whom I told you” and I want “The man I told you of”.’28
By Christmas 1932 Lewis had finished revising the manuscript, drawn a map to go on the end leaves and sent it to J.M. Dent & Sons. They accepted it on condition that it be shortened and the title altered. At the last moment they wanted to illustrate it – an idea that Lewis was successful in resisting. The title that appeared on the proof copy was The Pilgrim’s Regress, or Pseudo-Bunyan’s Periplus: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. Dents knew there would be some who would not understand the meaning of ‘Periplus’ (circumnavigation) and Lewis was prevailed upon to omit that part of the title before the book was published on 25 May 1933.
The Pilgrim’s Regress picked up some excellent reviews. ‘It is impossible’, said The Times Literary Supplement of 6 July 1933, ‘to traverse more than a few pages of the allegory without recognizing a style that is out of the ordinary … Moreover when John, the pilgrim-hero of this “Regress”, begins to find the way to salvation he is inspired to break into fragments of song … revealing a poetic gift that may rightly be called arresting.’29 ‘Thanks to a mind of quite remarkable acuity,’ said George Sayer in the Catholic magazine, Blackfriars (4 January 1936), ‘he is able to expose, in only a few lines, the most essential weakness of almost every contemporary doctrine.’ Another Catholic journal, the Downside Review (January 1936) congratulated the author on making ‘a notable contribution to Catholic literature’.
The Pilgrim’s Regress was not a commercial success: Dent sold only 680 of the 1,000 copies they printed. But it was noticed by the Catholic publishers Sheed & Ward of London; Dents printed a further 1,500 copies and passed them all over to this firm, who brought out an edition in October 1935. Quite apart from the richness of its ideas, The Pilgrim’s Regress – especially because it is an allegory – was found to be too complicated for those who come to the faith by simpler routes. Realizing this, Lewis wrote an explanatory preface and running headlines for the edition Geoffrey Bles brought out in 1943.
Not did the book find universal critical favour. The Regress put many backs up because of the volleys Lewis launched, via the characters ‘Mr Broad’ and ‘Neo-Angular’, at Broad Churchmen and High Anglicans. One of those who criticized Lewis for his hasty generalizations was his Irish acquaintance, Canon Claude Chavasse.* Admitting that his book was over-bitter and uncharitable, Lewis replied on 20 February 1934 that the Broad Church suffered from a ‘confusion between mere natural goodness and Grace which is non-Christian’ and was ‘what I most hate and fear in the world’.30 Writing to Canon Chavasse again on 25 February, Lewis said, ‘What I am attacking in Neo-Angular is a set of people who seem to me … to be trying to make of Christianity itself one more highbrow, Chelsea, bourgeois-baiting fad’ and ‘T.S. Eliot is the single man who sums up the thing I am fighting against.’31
Most critics supposed Lewis to be more Catholic than he believed himself to be. This was probably because he appeared to give more importance to ‘Mother Kirk’ than to faith. He was furious when he discovered that Sheed & Ward had, in a blurb on the jacket of their edition, written ‘This story begins in Puritania (Mr Lewis was brought up in Ulster) …’ thus implying that the book was an attack on his country and the Anglican Church. In later editions Lewis explained that ‘Mother Kirk’ was intended to be ‘Traditional Christianity’.
Lewis need not have resented the Catholic interest in The Pilgrim’s Regress. Had he lived longer he would have found that his book anticipated a number of truths iterated at the Second Vatican Council in 1960–5. It was pagan literature that roused the ‘sweet desire’ that finally led him to orthodox Christianity; however, the fact that God is responsible for such truth as is found in pagan literature and non-Christian religions never led Lewis to minimize the universality of Jesus Christ who is forever ‘the Way, the Truth and the Life’. He would, then, have probably rejoiced to find his beliefs about the pagans spelled out in the Vatican Council’s Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (1965), which states that:
Throughout history even to the present day, there is found among different peoples a certain awareness of a hidden power, which lies behind the course of nature and the events of human life. At times there is present even a recognition of a supreme being, or still more of a Father … The Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in these religions … Yet she proclaims and is in duty bound to proclaim without fail, Christ who is the way, the truth and the life (John 1:6).32
One occurrence which more than compensated for Lewis’s belief that he had failed with his new book, was that after Warnie’s retirement from the Army he had arrived at The Kilns during Christmas 1932. ‘He has become a permanent member of our household’, Lewis wrote to Arthur on 4 February 1933, ‘and I hope we shall pass the rest of our lives together … We both have a feeling that “the wheel has come full circuit”, that the period of wanderings is over, and that everything which has happened between 1914 and 1932 was an interruption … We make a very contented family together.’33
The winter of 1932 was brightened further by a children’s story which Tolkien had just written. Lewis found The Hobbit (1937) – as it later came to be called – uncannily good, another door into that world of faerie he first discovered in Phantastes. At the same time, he had mixed feelings about supervising a thesis on George MacDonald. He found it difficult to approach as work something so old and intimate, and felt that the American girl who was writing on ‘The Fairy Tales and Fantasies of George MacDonald’ was quite unworthy of her subject. Nevertheless, he persevered and Miss M.M. McEldowney was awarded the B.Litt. in 1934.
In celebration of Warnie’s retirement, the Lewis brothers decided to combine a holiday at sea with a visit to their uncles (Albert’s brothers) in Scotland. On 3 August 1933 they took a train to Arrochar, Dunbartonshire, where they stayed the night. The next day they spent walking on the shores of Loch Long and Loch Lomond and across the mountains between them. Lewis, who wilted in very hot weather and claimed to have the constitution of a polar bear, was delighted on discovering a pool tucked away in the mountains near Loch Lomond. There they stripped and lay in the pool under a little waterfall. This glorious day was followed by a week’s visit to their uncles Bill and Dick Lewis at Helensburgh.34 Uncle Bill, whom they had nicknamed ‘Limpopo’, bore a strong resemblance to their father, and in a letter to Arthur on 17 August Lewis said, ‘It was uncannily like being at home again – specially when Uncle Bill announced on the Sunday evening “I won’t be going into town to-morrow”, and we with well-feigned enthusiasm replied “Good!”’35
The next day, Monday, 7 August, they sailed from Glasgow in a Clyde Shipping Company boat down the River Clyde, crossed the Irish Sea, and docked in Belfast the following morning. After walking about Campbell College and Little Lea, they visited their old parish church, St Mark’s, so that Warnie could see for the first time the stained-glass window they had erected there in memory of their parents. They sailed again at one o’clock the same day from Waterford and arrived in Plymouth on 10 August. En route to Oxford they visited Romsey Abbey (14 August). Lewis, on learning that one of the twelfth-century abbesses had rejoiced in the name of ‘Joan Jack’, observed to his brother that she ‘must have been a comfortable, easy-going kind of person’.36
Back in Oxford, Lewis was taken to the cinema on 17 August to see Noël Coward’s Cavalcade. He expected it to be interesting historically but came out feeling he had been at a debauch. He was, nevertheless, lured back a few weeks later to see King Kong, which he liked because of its Rider Haggardish atmosphere. Still, he never cared for this kind of amusement. Once, when Hooper suggested that they see a film, Lewis summed up his attitude to the cinema: ‘I like some science-fiction, some romances of high adventure, but I can’t take’ – (holding his nose) – ‘dram – a!’
Immediately after King Kong Lewis settled down to work. He had been one of the public examiners in the Honours School of English from 1931 to 1933 and, once free of this obligation, he disappeared into the Duke Humfrey Library of the Bodleian to finish his book on medieval love poetry. The only substantial break he took before the book was completed was a week’s walking tour with Warnie in January 1935 during which they toyed with the delightful notion of devising a ‘beer map’ of England in which each area would be depicted with a different colour to indicate which Beer Baron controlled it.
Finally, after eight years of research and writing, Lewis informed R.W. Chapman of the Oxford University Press on 18 September 1935, ‘I have now finished my book The Allegorical Love Poem and am in search of a publisher.’ After outlining the chapters, he went on to say: ‘The book as a whole has two themes: 1. The birth of allegory and its growth from what it is in Prudentius to what it is in Spenser. 2. The birth of the romantic conception of love and the long struggle between its earlier form (the romance of adultery) and its later form (the romance of marriage).’37
Kenneth Sisam, the great medieval scholar who was assistant secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press, was asked to look after the book and he wrote to Lewis on 20 September to say that the Delegates of Oxford University Press wished to consider it at their first meeting in Michaelmas Term. He also thanked Lewis for consenting to write the volume on English Literature in the Sixteenth Century for the Oxford History of English Literature – a promise which Lewis’s former tutor, Professor F.P. Wilson, had extracted from him a few months earlier.
On 29 October the Delegates announced that they definitely wished to publish The Allegorical Love Poem and thereafter things began to move with unusual speed. Dom André Wilmart, the Patristic scholar, was asked to read and comment on the first two chapters, after which the book went to press and Lewis received the first batch of proofs before Christmas 1935. But Lewis, as will be seen, was not the only one to read them, and that other proof-reader, Charles Williams,* must now be introduced.
Some years before Dr R.W. Chambers had asked Lewis if he had read the ‘spiritual shockers’ of Charles Williams. Lewis made a mental note to try one but had not bothered till, in February 1936, when visiting Nevill Coghill in Exeter College, he heard his host praising Williams’s novel The Place of the Lion (1931). That night he took Coghill’s copy home and read it. It seems a pity to contradict the story Lewis told in the Preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams (1947) about how he wrote a fan letter to Williams twenty-four hours later, but it does not appear to be entirely accurate. What did happen was that he wrote to Arthur Greeves on 26 February saying:
I have just read what I think a really great book, The Place of the Lion by Charles Williams. It is based on the Platonic theory of the other world in which the archetypes of all earthly qualities exist: and in the novel … these archetypes start sucking our world back. The lion of strength appears in the world and the strength starts going out of houses and things into him. The archetypal butterfly … appears and all the butterflies of the world fly back into him. But man contains and ought to be able to rule all these forces: and there is one man in the book who does, and the story ends with him as a second Adam ‘naming the beasts’ and establishing dominion over them. It is not only a most exciting fantasy, but a deeply religious and (unobtrusively) a profoundly learned book. The reading of it has been a good preparation for Lent as far as I am concerned: for it shows me (through the heroine) the special sin of abuse of intellect to which all my profession are liable, more clearly than I ever saw it before. I have learned more than I ever knew yet about humility … Do get it, and don’t mind if you don’t understand everything the first time … It isn’t often now-a-days you get a Christian fantasy.38
Then, so captivated was he by the novel, he sent Coghill’s copy to Cecil Harwood and a note to Barfield urging him to read it next. He also mentioned the book to Sir Humphrey Milford, the head of Oxford University Press.
On 11 March 1936 Lewis wrote to Charles Williams praising The Place of the Lion and suggesting that they meet. Williams, who was on the editorial staff of the Oxford University Press, answered by return of post:
12 March 1936
My dear Mr Lewis,
If you had delayed writing another 24 hours our letters would have crossed. It has never before happened to me to be admiring an author of a book while he at the same time was admiring me. My admiration for the staff work of the Omnipotence rises every day.
To be exact, I finished on Saturday looking – too hastily – at proofs of your Allegorical Love Poem. I had been asked to write something about it for travellers and booksellers and people so I read it first. I permit myself to enclose a copy of what I said, because I wrote this on Monday and yesterday our Sir Humphrey told me in the afternoon that he understood you had been reading my Lion. So if ever I was drawn to anyone – imagine! I admit that I fell for the Allegorical Love Poem so heavily because it is an aspect of the subject with which my mind has always been playing … I regard your book as practically the only one that I have ever come across, since Dante, that shows the slightest understanding of what this very peculiar identity of love and religion means … As to your letter, what can I say? The public for all these novels has been so severely limited (though I admit in some cases passionate) that it gives me very high pleasure to feel that you liked the Lion … I do think it was extremely good of you to write and extraordinarily kind of the Omnipotence to arrange the coincidence. You must be in London sometimes. Do let me know and come and have lunch or dinner … I am here practically every day for all the day, and if you will send me a post card first I will see that I am … Do forgive this too long letter, but after all to write about your Love Poem and my Lion and both our Romantic Theology in one letter takes some paragraphs.
Very gratefully yours,
Charles Williams39
During the latter part of March, when Lewis was compiling an index for his book, the publishers suggested that the title be altered as the word ‘allegorical’ – though not ‘allegory’ – tended to put people off. Among the list of titles which Lewis thought of using instead was The House of Busirane, after the ‘vile enchanter’ Busirane who, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, symbolizes unlawful love. The publishers felt, however, that this made it sound too much like a novel and several of the staff, including Charles Williams, felt that The Allegory of Love might give a better idea of what the book was about. Lewis was persuaded to agree and the book was published on 21 May 1936 as The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition.
Up to this time Lewis was hardly known outside Oxford. With The Allegory of Love he firmly established himself as a first-rate scholar and a writer of exceptional imaginative power. The reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, adding one bouquet to another, said that in his chapter on Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde ‘Mr Lewis reaches his full stature as a critic. His … appreciation of Chaucer’s marvellous poem [is] of the very highest quality … the proof, if the reader of his book needs any, that the historical method, in the hands of one who can keep imaginative control of the facts, adds depth to appreciation while taking nothing from its immediacy.’40 Since its publication The Allegory of Love has, over and over again, been classed as one of those rare books, such as A.C. Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy (1904), W.P. Ker’s Epic and Romance (1897), and John Livingston Lowes’s Road to Xanadu (1927), which not only shed fresh light on literature but which are truly ‘unputdownable’.
It would be misleading to talk about what the critics said about Lewis’s book as it goes on being praised by many – as well as debunked by a few who believe the author made too little use of the Patristic Fathers or that he was wrong in suggesting that romantic love was an invention of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless, to give some idea of how immediately successful The Allegory of Love was with the most eminent scholars of the 1930s, Professor R.W. Chambers wrote to Lewis on 28 January 1938 saying that ‘on second reading it seems to me quite the greatest thing done in England for medieval studies since Ker’s Epic and Romance’. In 1937, when Lewis and Dr E.M.W. Tillyard were midway through their controversy over the ‘Personal Heresy’ in the pages of Essays and Studies, Tillyard broke off to congratulate his opponent:
May I be allowed to say what lively pleasure and admiration I experienced in reading the Allegory of Love? Not only have I learnt a very great deal but I got that rare joy – the sense of much matter marshalled, digested into a book. At last, I exclaim, a medievalist who is also a critic. And I found the preliminary matter quite as thrilling as the rest: the account of how allegory arose was something that I had long been wanting. And your plea for accepting allegory and your putting of that acceptance to critical use does seem to me to matter enormously. It casts light on what should not be but undoubtedly is a disgracefully dark place … I see you are whacking back at me in the next volume of Essays and Studies;41 and I look forward to the article provided the mincemeat you reduce me to is not too small.
One of the most recent criticisms of Lewis’s scholarly works came from his former pupil, Professor John Lawlor.* ‘The Allegory of Love’, he said, ‘remains compulsively readable, as few other works of historical literary criticism can claim to be, even in isolated passages; and if anyone can be said to have ended a tradition of dullness in scholarly writing, it is surely Lewis in his great, forever readable book.’42 More than that, said Professor Lawlor, Lewis’s scholarly works are ‘not so much accounts of literature in the past as themselves instances of literature’.43
With the publication of Spirits in Bondage, Lewis’s desire for fame had begun to inhibit the natural itch to write that he had felt ever since he first put pen to paper. His conversion, though it had helped him accept the fact that he might never be a successful poet, led him further to question the value of all cultural activities. Was he – or, for that matter, was anyone – justified in spending so much time on literature? Was it not very much like fiddling while Rome burned? By the time The Allegory of Love was published he had come a long way towards answering this question. The conclusions he reached combined with other areas of his work in forming his distinctive approach to literary history and literary criticism.
The essence of the problem for Lewis was the conflict between Objectivity and Subjectivity. A thumbnail sketch of this is found in Lewis’s essay ‘The Empty Universe’:
The process whereby man has come to know the universe is from one point of view extremely complicated; from another it is alarmingly simple … At the outset the universe appears packed with will, intelligence, life and positive qualities; every tree is a nymph and every planet a god … The advance of knowledge gradually empties this rich and genial universe: first of its gods, then of its colours, smells, sounds and tastes, finally of solidity itself as solidity was originally imagined. As these items are taken from the world, they are transferred to the subjective side of the account: classified as sensations, thoughts, images or emotions. The Subject becomes gorged, inflated, at the expense of the Object. But the matter does not rest there. The same method which has emptied the world now proceeds to empty ourselves.44
We have seen Lewis expressing this view to E.M.W. Tillyard, who was for many years a Fellow of English at Jesus College, Cambridge. In their ‘Personal Heresy’ debate Lewis maintained that the Subject (the reader) was becoming gorged and inflated at the expense of the Object (poetry). Literature, insisted Lewis, is not ‘the private furniture of the poet’s mind’ but ‘an acquisition, a voyage beyond the limits of his personal point of view, an annihilation of the brute fact of his own particular psychology rather than its assertion’.45 We noticed earlier, in our chapter on ‘Conversion’, that Lewis accepted Christianity, not because it consists of subjective theories about God, but because it is about ‘real things’ – ‘the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection’.
In time Lewis’s debate about Subjectivity grew to include a further debate about the importance of Culture. And this involved two other members of the English Faculty at Cambridge. I.A. Richards (1893–1979), Fellow of English at Magdalene College, Cambridge, inaugurated a modern critical movement through his Principles of Literary Criticism (1925), which Lewis read and, in his personal copy, annotated. In that book Richards argued that one of the qualifications for being a good critic is that one ‘must be a sound judge of values’. Later, in Science and Poetry (1926), he argued that ‘Poetry is failing us, or we it, if after our reading we do not find ourselves changed … with a permanent alteration of our possibilities as responsive individuals in good or bad adjustments to all but overwhelming concourse of stimulations.’ It became increasingly clear that to Richards poetry was to be a means of salvation.
Richards’s theory of value and his notion of poetry as having a soteriological function was even more pronounced in the most outspoken voice of the Cambridge school of literary criticism. This was F.R. Leavis (1895–1978) of Downing College, who wanted to see Culture made the basis of a humane society, but without basing it on any objective standard – and certainly not Christianity. To this end Leavis founded the periodical Scrutiny (1932–53), in which the editors expressed a belief in ‘a necessary relationship between the quality of the individual’s response to art and his general fitness for a humane existence’.46
Later in his life Lewis was to engage with Leavis’s ideas again; but now he responded to the Cambridge school of literary criticism in two important essays. The first, ‘Christianity and Literature’, was published in Rehabilitations (1939) and reprinted in Christian Reflections (1969); in it he maintained that though the recipe for writing Christian and secular literature is the same (good diction and the like), a Christian approach to literary theory and criticism ought not to be like that of most secular writers. The latter describe great authors as always ‘breaking fetters’, ‘bursting bonds’ and generally ‘being themselves’.47 Though the New Testament has nothing to say of literature, the metaphors it most often uses are those of ‘imitation’, ‘reflection’ and ‘assimilation’.48 In St John’s Gospel, Christ ‘copies’ the operation of the Father.49 Thus, while secular critics aim at being ‘original’ and ‘creative’, ‘originality’, Lewis believed, is plainly the prerogative of God alone.50
The Christian approach to literature, Lewis concludes, ought to be very like Phemius’s claim to be a poet (in Odyssey xxii, 347): ‘I am self-taught; a god has inspired me with all manner of songs.’ Says Lewis:
The unbeliever may take his own temperament and experience, just as they happen to stand, and consider them worth communicating simply because they are facts, or, worse still, because they are his. To the Christian his own temperament and experience, as mere fact, and as merely his, are of no value or importance whatsoever: he will deal with them, if at all, only because they are the medium through which, or the position from which, something universally profitable appeared to him … And always, of every idea and of every method he will ask not ‘Is it mine?, but ‘Is it good?’51
Lewis’s fighting instincts were instantly engaged when he read an article by Brother George Every on ‘The Necessity of Scrutiny’ in the columns of Theology (March 1939). Brother Every suggested that theological students should be ‘tested’ on their ability to read a new piece of writing on a secular subject, thus hinting that ‘culture’ and ‘good taste’ were almost as important as Christianity itself. Lewis’s response was a second essay, ‘Christianity and Culture’. In this he stated that after trying to determine the value of culture from the writings of St Matthew, St Luke, St Paul, Aristotle, St Augustine, St Jerome, Milton, and Cardinal Newman he had come to the conclusion that ‘the whole tradition of educated infidelity’ from Matthew Arnold to Scrutiny ‘appeared to me as but one phase in that general rebellion against God which began in the eighteenth century’.52 He summed up: ‘My general case may be stated in Ricardian terms – that culture is a storehouse of the best (sub-Christian) values. These values are in themselves of the soul, not the spirit … They will save no man … The work of a charwoman and the work of a poet become spiritual in the same way and on the same condition.’53
In this miniature apologia he argues the claims both for and against culture, arriving at the following conclusions: (1) The safest and shortest way towards salvation is devotion to the person of Christ. (2) Most men glorify God by doing to his glory things which, though not per se acts of glorification, become so by being offered to him. (3) Though culture in itself will save no man, it sometimes has a distinct part to play in bringing souls to Christ – is sometimes a road into Jerusalem, and sometimes the road out. (4) People such as himself, who are not fit for any other kind of work, are justified in making their living by teaching and writing. It was this last point which set free Lewis’s own genius – as we shall see from the chapter that follows.
* Frederick William Calcutt ‘Fred’ Paxford (1898–1979) was born in Fifield, Oxfordshire, on 5 August 1898, the son of Alice Sophia Paxford. Lewis and Mrs Moore hired him shortly after they moved to The Kilns in 1930, and he remained there until Lewis’s death. Over the years he became an integral part of their lives. Mrs Moore was particularly dedicated to him, and he to her. He never married, and was perfectly content with his radio, cigarettes and the occasional pint. In 1964 he retired to the little village of Churchill, near where he was born. There he had a little garden of his own. He died on 10 August 1979. See his biography in CG.
* Dom Bede Griffiths OSB (1906–93) was born Alan Richard Griffiths. He went up to Magdalen College in 1925 where he was tutored by Lewis. After becoming a Christian in 1931 he was almost immediately received into the Catholic Church, and a year later he became a novice at the Benedictine priory of Prinknash. Dom Bede made his final vows in 1936 and was ordained in 1940. In 1947 he became Prior at Farnborough, and in 1951 he was sent to the new Scottish priory at Pluscarden as novice master. By this time Dom Bede was interested in Eastern thought, and in 1955 his order sent him to India. He founded Kurisumala Ashram, a Benedictine monastery of the Syrian rite, in Kerala. In 1968 he went to Saccidananda Ashram, Shantivanam, in Tamil Nadu. This ashram was a pioneer attempt to found a Christian community following the customs of a Hindu ashram and adapting itself to Hindu ways of life and thought. Dom Bede’s many books include his autobiography, The Golden String (1954), The Marriage of East and West (1982), and A New Vision of Reality (1989).
* Writing about his own first dive in one of his notebooks, Lewis explained the religious connection: ‘Nothing is simpler than this art. You do not need to do anything, you need only to stop doing something, to abstain from all attempt at self-preservation – to obey the command which Saint Augustine heard in a different context, Securus te projice.’
* The Rev. Canon Claude Lionel Chavasse (1897–1983), of an Anglo-Irish family, was educated at Haileybury College and Exeter College, Oxford. He came to know the entire Lewis family when he was curate of St Mark’s Church, Dundela, 1928–31. From Belfast he went on to serve in a number of churches in Co. Cork, after which he was vicar of Kidlington, Oxon., 1947–58.
* Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886–1945) was London born and bred. He attended the University of London and in 1908 joined the London branch of Oxford University Press, for whom he worked for the rest of his life. In 1917 he married Florence Conway, and they had one son, Michael Stansby Williams, born 18 June 1922. A reading of Dante’s Divine Comedy led to one of his most remarkable ideas, the ‘Beatrician experience’. This is a recovery of that vision which would have been common to each of us if Man had not fallen. The fullest expression of this ‘Theology of Romantic Love’ is found in Williams’s He Came Down from Heaven (1938). Lewis’s own favourites of his books were Williams’s ‘supernatural thrillers’: War in Heaven (1930); Many Dimensions (1931); The Place of the Lion (1931); The Greater Trumps (1932); Shadows of Ecstasy (1933); Descent into Hell (1937); All Hallows’ Eve (1945). For more information see Lewis’s preface to Essays Presented to Charles Williams, ed. C.S. Lewis (1947).
* John James Lawlor (1918–99) read English with Lewis at Magdalen College and took his BA in 1939. He saw service in the Devonshire Regiment, 1940–5, and he returned to Oxford in 1947 as lecturer in English at Brasenose and Trinity College. In 1950 he became Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Keele, retiring in 1980. His works include The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (1960) and Piers Plowman: an Essay in Criticism (1962). He was the editor of Patterns of Love and Courtesy: Essays in Memory of C.S. Lewis (1966), and his C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections (1998) is an invaluable work of biography and criticism.
1 FL, pp. 973–4.
2 LP III, p. 302.
3 1 Peter 3:15.
4 Matthew 7:20.
5 TST, pp. 432–3.
6 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945), ch. 5, pt. 3, p. 117.
7 Letters, p. 292.
8 ‘Unreal Estate’, in Of This and Other Worlds, p. 192. Published in the US as On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (1982), p. 153.
9 George Bailey, ‘In the University’, C.S. Lewis: Speaker & Teacher, ed. Carolyn Keefe (1971), p. 89.
10 T.S. Eliot, Selected Essays (1923), p. 137.
11 C.S. Lewis and E.M.W. Tillyard, The Personal Heresy: A Controversy (1939), ch. 1, p. 11.
12 Bodleian Library, MS Eng. lett. c. 220/2, fol. 178.
13 Ibid., fols 179–80.
14 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), ch. 1.
15 TST, p. 452.
16 The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (1936), ch. 2, pp. 44–5.
17 ‘The Vision of John Bunyan’, Selected Literary Essays, ed. Walter Hooper (1969), p. 149.
18 The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933; new and revised edn, 1943; Fount, 1998), bk VIII, ch. 6, p. 184.
19 Ibid., bk VIII, ch. 8, p. 189.
20 Ibid., p. 193.
21 Ibid., pp. 193–4.
22 Ibid., ch. 10, p. 200.
23 St Augustine, Confessions, VIII.ix.27, ‘throw yourself away without care’.
24 The Pilgrim’s Regress, bk IX, ch. 4, pp. 221–2.
25 TST, p. 447.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid., letter of 4 December 1932, p. 445.
28 Ibid.
29 The Times Literary Supplement (6 July 1933), p. 456.
30 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols 81–2.
31 Ibid.
32 Vatican Council: The Conciliar and Post-Conciliar Documents, ed. Austin Flannery OP, Volume I, revised edn (1988), pp. 738–9.
33 TST, p. 448.
34 For more information on Albert’s brothers, see William Lewis (1859–1946) and Richard Lewis (b. 1861) in The Lewis Family, found in the Biographical Appendix to FL, pp. 1014–18.
35 TST, p. 456.
36 ‘C.S. Lewis: 1898–1963’, ch. 8, p. 210.
37 Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 297, fol. 24.
38 TST, p. 479.
39 Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. c. 6825, fols 48–9.
40 The Times Literary Supplement (6 June 1939), p. 475.
41 C.S. Lewis, ‘Open Letter to Dr Tillyard’, Essays and Studies, vol. XIX (1936), pp. 153–68.
42 John Lawlor, C.S. Lewis: Memories and Reflections (1998), p. 103.
43 Ibid., p. 98. Emphasis added.
44 Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (Fount, 1986), p. 81.
45 The Personal Heresy, ch. 1, pp. 26–7.
46 ‘Scrutiny: A Manifesto’, Scrutiny, vol. I, No. 1 (May 1932), p. 5.
47 ‘Christianity and Literature’, Christian Reflections, ed. Walter Hooper (1967; Fount, 1998), p. 4.
48 Ibid., p. 6.
49 Ibid., p. 7.
50 Ibid., p. 8.
51 Ibid., pp. 8–9.
52 ‘Christianity and Culture’, p. 19.
53 Ibid., pp. 23, 24.