‘Perhaps being maddeningly busy is the best thing for me,’ Lewis wrote to Vera Gebbert on 5 August 1960. ‘Anyway, I am. This is one of those things which makes the tragedies of real life so very unlike those of the stage.’
It is ironic that the day after Joy died, 14 July 1960, Lewis had an appointment to talk about the stage. The musician Donald Swann* had been haunted for years by the beauty of Lewis’s interplanetary novel, Perelandra, and he talked to his fellow musician, David Marsh, about making it into an opera. They wrote to Lewis about their ideas and found him sympathetic. For whatever reason, Lewis did not cancel his appointment with Donald Swann and David Marsh for 14 July, and years later Donald Swann recorded in his autobiography, Swann’s Way:
There is one episode I shall always remember. This was during one of our occasional meetings when David and I were starting on Perelandra. It was a quiet morning and we went to Lewis’s home in Oxford for breakfast. We strolled around his lovely garden with him, talking about the opera. After about an hour he said: ‘I hope you will excuse me. I must go now because my wife died last night.’ He left us. I was very moved. Quite overcome. It is just another story of this very gracious gentleman who always looked after his guests. I mean, at a time like that! What did we matter?
Of all the interruptions Lewis might have had during this time, this was certainly one of the most pleasant. He met Donald Swann and David Marsh again for talk on 8 September and the three of them had lunch together on 20 September. Over the next three years they proceeded to set Perelandra to music.
Before these other meetings with Swann and Marsh, Lewis met Joy’s first husband, Bill Gresham. Not long before she died, Joy and Bill had been planning his trip to Oxford so that he could see her and the boys. Joy last wrote to him on 2 July about things he might bring David and Douglas. Lewis sent a note to Gresham on the day of the funeral saying, ‘Joy died on the 13th July. This need make no change in your plans, but I thought you should arrive knowing it.’ Bill Gresham travelled by ship and arrived in Oxford on 3 August to find that Lewis had booked him a room at the Old Black Horse Inn in St Clement’s Street. Lewis met him several times during his stay.
Although Jack had told the boys that their father’s visit would ‘probably cheer us all up’, it was awkward for everyone. Besides losing Joy, it was clear to Gresham that he had lost his sons as well. Writing about the reunion with his father years later, Douglas said: ‘I was an English schoolboy by then … so I shook his hand and said, “How do you do, sir?” In truth, I confess I felt no emotion for him at all. He was a stranger; we could not bridge the gap of the years of separation. We spent considerable time together and became friends, but really that was all. When he left to go back to America and his new family, I missed him less than I did before he had come.’ Being a year older, David remembered his father better, but they had been separated too long for him to feel much. Gresham returned home on 15 August, and it was not long before he was ill himself.
Warnie went to Ireland on 25 July and Mother Mary Martin was soon in touch with Jack: his brother was in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda. ‘W. is away on his Irish holiday’, Jack wrote to Arthur on 30 August, ‘and has, as usual, drunk himself into hospital. Douglas – the younger boy – is, as always, an absolute brick, and a very bright spot in my life. I’m quite well myself. In fact, by judicious diet and exercise, I’ve brought myself down from 13 stone to just under 11.’
Lewis was unable to leave The Kilns until Warnie returned. But, as so often, he followed the advice he had given Arthur all those years ago, ‘Start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills.’ What became A Grief Observed began with a few observations made to Austin and Katharine Farrer. Writing to them on 22 July, he said, ‘There are a lot of things about sorrow which no one (least of all the tragedians) have told me. I never dreamed that, in between the moments of acute suffering, it would be so like somnambulism or like being slightly drunk. Nor, physically, often so like fear.’ He wrote to Katharine Farrer again on 25 July, using some of the very words found in A Grief Observed: ‘I’m learning a good many things about grief which the novelists and poets never told me. It has as many different facets as love or anger or any other passion. In the lulls – between the peaks – there is something in it very like fidgety boredom: like just “hanging about waiting” – tho’ what the deuce one thinks one is waiting for I don’t know.’
Shortly after making those observations, Lewis began writing A Grief Observed, a powerful work of Christian apologetics based on the grief caused by Joy’s death. When Roger Lancelyn Green visited The Kilns between 31 August and 2 September 1960 Lewis showed him the manuscript. The possibility of its publication was mentioned to Green under pledge of secrecy.
Lewis had a typescript made of the work and gave it to his literary agent, Spencer Curtis Brown, when they had lunch together on 21 September. He explained that he did not want to draw attention to himself. For this reason, he had decided to publish under the pseudonym Dimidius – Latin for ‘halved’ or ‘divided in two’. In choosing this particular name he almost certainly had in mind something he remembered about Charles Williams: ‘There lived in Williams a sceptic and even a pessimist. No man – and least of all the common run of antitheists – could have written a better attack on Christianity than he. He used to say that if he were rich enough to build a church he would dedicate it to St Thomas Didymus Sceptic.’
To deflect attention, Spencer Curtis Brown did not offer the book to Lewis’s usual publishers, Geoffrey Bles, but sent the typescript to Faber & Faber, one of whose directors was T.S. Eliot. On 24 October 1960 Curtis Brown wrote to Lewis, ‘I know that the enclosed copy of the letter from T.S. Eliot will give you pleasure.’ Eliot had replied to Curtis Brown on 20 October 1960:
I and two other Directors have read A Grief Observed. My wife has read it also, and we have all been deeply moved by it. We do in fact want to publish it …
We are of the opinion that we have guessed the name of the author. If, as you intimate and as I should expect from the man I think it is, he does sincerely want anonymity, we agree that a plausible English pseudonym would hold off enquirers better than Dimidius. The latter is sure to arouse curiosity and there must be plenty of other people amongst those who know him, and perhaps even amongst the readers of his work who do not know him, who may be able to penetrate the disguise once they set their minds working.
This was not entirely an inspired guess. One of the directors mentioned in Eliot’s letter was Charles Monteith, who had been one of Lewis’s pupils at Magdalen College. While reading the typescript he recognized some of Lewis’s handwritten corrections.
In any event, Lewis saw the force of Eliot’s argument, and he devised a new pseudonym for himself. He had used the name ‘Nat Whilk’ or ‘N.W.’ – Anglo-Saxon for ‘I know not whom’ – for many years. He now combined that with ‘Clerk’, which in medieval usage meant ‘scholar’, and came up with the pseudonym N.W. Clerk. The book was published on 29 September 1961 as by N.W. Clerk and, until it came out under his own name in 1964, few ‘penetrated the disguise’.
Having given him time to be alone, Lewis’s friends now rallied round. Austin Farrer became Warden of Keble College in 1960, and he and Katharine invited him to the Warden’s Lodgings for dinner on 15 September. Roger and June Lancelyn Green urged him to come up to Cheshire for a visit beginning on 24 September. This, however, depended upon Warnie’s being at home. Douglas was joining his elder brother at Magdalen College School for the Michaelmas Term of 1960, and as they were day-boys someone had to be in charge at The Kilns. Lewis wrote to Roger on 15 September:
Oh Hell! What a trial I am to you both! If Warnie really came home on the 23rd – and if he did not come home so drunk as to have to be put straight into a nursing home – I could and would with delight come to you on the 24th. But neither is really at all probable. And of course I can’t leave this house with no grown-up in charge. What it comes to is that you must count me out. I am very sorry. Don’t make any further efforts to accommodate such an entangled man as me.
The holiday in Cheshire had to be abandoned, but Warnie returned in time for Jack to go back to Cambridge on 5 October. Lewis had been elected a member of the Athenaeum Club in London in 1957 – one of his proposers having been Bishop Harry Carpenter – and he spent the night of 6 October in the Athenaeum in order to attend the Committee on the Revision of the Psalms at Lambeth Palace the next morning. Then back to Cambridge to begin his lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’ for Michaelmas Term. When Francis Warner met Lewis for his next tutorial he found him wearing a black tie. ‘My wife has just died,’ explained Lewis.
When not lecturing, Lewis was busy with a new Screwtape project. He had found the writing of the original Screwtape Letters a ‘stifling experience’ and he was resolved never to write any more Letters. Even so, a few years later he found that the idea of ‘something like a lecture or “address” hovered vaguely’ in his mind. ‘Then came an invitation from the Saturday Evening Post, and that, he said, ‘pressed the trigger’. The result was ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’, which appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of 19 December 1959. Before the ‘Toast’ was completed Lewis began planning what he called ‘The Whole Screwtape’ – a volume that combined the original Letters, the new ‘Toast’, and a new preface. He completed the preface and sent it to his publisher, Jock Gibb, on 15 December. The ‘Whole Screwtape’ involved so many small problems that Lewis became tetchy.
‘Drat that omnibus!’ he wrote to Gibb on 9 October 1960. In the first of the original Letters Screwtape writes about how he tempted a ‘Patient’ reading in the British Museum. (This was before the British Library moved into a separate building from the British Museum.) Screwtape said that once the young man had left the Museum and ‘was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unalterable conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man’s head when he was shut up along with his books, a healthy dose of “real life” … was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn’t be true.’
For the last twenty years readers had been complaining that it was impossible to see a no. 73 bus from the British Museum. Gibb wanted to finally settle the matter of what could and could not be seen ‘from the British Museum’ before they published the new Screwtape Letters. ‘It need not be visible from the B.M.,’ Lewis said in his letter of 9 October. ‘It need be visible only in some neighbouring street which the patient might see on his way to or from lunch. If you can provide the number of any bus that might be seen in some such neighbouring street, and then emend street to streets in the last line of p. 24, we shall have saved our bacon. If this is impossible, then take your choice of green coach, jeep, fire engine, Rolls, police car, or ambulance.’
The problem was solved at last. Lewis ‘saved his bacon’ by altering the original words ‘Once he was in the street the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No. 73 bus going past’ to read ‘Once he was in the streets the battle was won. I showed him …’ Lewis had a final meeting with Gibb on 30 November to discuss the book, and The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, with a New Preface was published on 27 February 1961.
Lewis next found himself in a violent tussle with the ‘Leavisites’ – the followers of F.R. Leavis. In his ‘Interim Report’ of 1956 he had pointed out that Cambridge was dominated by literary criticism and that one was never safe from ‘the Critic’. The School of English was still a very recent addition to the universities, and Lewis had worried about its practice of criticism degenerating into little more than a parade of feelings.
Lewis had started work on An Experiment in Criticism before he broke off to write A Grief Observed. Back in Cambridge he resumed work on it. Meanwhile, the Leavisites were preparing an attack. Their dislike of Lewis went deep, but their attack was occasioned by a comment on undergraduate criticism Lewis wrote for the 9 March 1960 issue of the little Cambridge Broadsheet:
The faults I find in contemporary undergraduate criticism are these: (1) In adverse criticism their tone is that of personal resentment. They are more anxious to wound the author than to inform the reader. Adverse criticism should diagnose and exhibit faults, not abuse them. (2) They are far too ready to advance or accept radical reinterpretations of works which have already been before the world for several generations. The prima facie improbability that these have never till now been understood is ignored. (3) Most European literature was composed for adult readers who knew the Bible and the Classics. It is not the modern student’s fault that he lacks this background; but he is insufficiently aware of his lack and of the necessity for extreme caution which it imposes on him. He should think twice before discovering ‘irony’ in passages which everyone has hitherto taken ‘straight’. (4) He approaches literature with the wrong kind of seriousness. He uses as a substitute for religion or philosophy or psychotherapy works which were intended as divertissements. The nature of the comic is a subject for serious consideration; but one needs to have seen the joke and taken it as a joke first.
Of course none of these critical vices are peculiar to undergraduates. They imitate that which, in their elders, has far less excuse.
Leavis’s Scrutiny ceased publication in October 1953. The closest thing to a replacement was Delta: The Cambridge Literary Magazine, a Cambridge undergraduate publication which began life when Scrutiny ended. Lewis’s comments on ‘Undergraduate Criticism’ went unremarked for some months, after which Delta devoted a twelve-page article to ‘Professor C.S. Lewis and the English Faculty’. The editors, Simon Gray of Trinity College and Howard Burns of King’s, were incensed that he should think the Bible and the classics important in understanding most European literature. ‘In placing the stress there,’ they complained, ‘Professor Lewis appears to be indicating both a contempt for the undergraduate’s preoccupation with literature, and even more seriously, what amounts to contempt for the highly individual sensibilities and imaginations … that have created so differently in our literature.’ After touching on every point of Lewis’s article, they concluded that its tone was ‘distasteful in its arrogance, distasteful in its authoritarian self-righteousness, distasteful finally in the contempt for the undergraduate that it suggests’.
The argument was picked up by the Cambridge University newspaper, Varsity, in an article called ‘Detachment’ (15 October): ‘Professor C.S. Lewis, when asked to comment on the attacks on him in last week’s “Delta”, … informs us that “(a) he can’t bear interviews … (b) he never heard of ‘Delta’ and knows nothing about the articles”. See what they mean?’ From there news of it spread to The Listener (20 October). A leader entitled ‘English – Left or Right’ stated that
What we are witnessing is one more skirmish in the battle between ‘tradition’ (the Classics, ‘Q’, the historical approach) and ‘nonconformity’ (Dr Leavis, psychology, sociology, and practical criticism) … There must be an agreed hard core of fact. You cannot start selecting until you have some idea what there is to select from. It is all very well to sneer at Aristotle as irrelevant to our time. But who are the editors of Delta, who is any man, that they or he should call Aristotle irrelevant?
This, in its turn, elicited a very long letter from F.R. Leavis himself, who in The Listener of 3 November said he could not see anything in Delta ‘that is not decent and intelligent. Professor Lewis himself, in launching such an attack, will hardly have expected to remain unanswered.’ At the end of a very heated debate that went on for months, and in which The Times Literary Supplement (25 November) and The Spectator (16 December) took part, Lewis finally responded with a letter to the editors of Delta (February 1961):
I complained that the tone of undergraduate criticism was too often ‘that of passionate resentment’. You illustrate this admirably by accusing me of ‘Pecksniffian disingenuousness’, ‘shabby bluff’ and ‘self-righteousness’. Do not misunderstand. I am not in the least deprecating your insults; I have enjoyed these twenty years l’honneur d’être une cible and am now pachydermatous. I am not even rebuking your bad manners; I am not Mr. Turveydrop and ‘gentlemanly deportment’ is not a subject I am paid to teach. What shocks me is that students, academics, men of letters, should display what I had thought was an essentially uneducated inability to differentiate between a disputation and a quarrel. The real objection to this sort of thing is that it is all a distraction from the issue. You waste on calling me liar and hypocrite time you ought to have spent on refuting my position. Even if your main purpose was to gratify a resentment, you have gone about it the wrong way. Any man would much rather be called names than proved wrong.
Lewis had finished his lectures on ‘Some Difficult Words’ in 1959, and on 9 September 1960 the book based on those lectures, Studies in Words, was published by Cambridge University Press. Ever since his debate with E.M.W. Tillyard in the 1930s over ‘The Personal Heresy’, Lewis had been urging his readers to find in literature ‘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’, and in his new book he continues the argument. ‘One of my aims’, he said in the introduction,
is to facilitate, as regards certain words, a more accurate reading of the old books; and therefore to encourage everyone to similar exploration of many other words. I am sometimes told that there are people who want a study of literature wholly free from philology; that is, from the love and knowledge of words. Perhaps no such people exist. If they do, they are either crying for the moon or else resolving on a lifetime of persistent and carefully guarded delusion. If we read an old poem with insufficient regard for change in the overtones, and even the dictionary meanings, of words since its date – if, in fact, we are content with whatever effect the words accidentally produce in our modern minds – then of course we do not read the poem the old writer intended. What we get may still be, in our opinion, a poem; but it will be our poem, not his.
He goes on to say that ‘After hearing one chapter of his book when it was still a lecture, a man remarked to me “You have made me afraid to say anything at all.” I know what he meant … It is well we should become aware of what we are doing when we speak, of the ancient, fragile, and (well used) immensely potent instruments that words are.’ Talking of good and bad language, he defines the delicious word ‘Verbicide’:
Verbicide, the murder of a word, happens in many ways. Inflation is one of the commonest; those who taught us to say awfully for ‘very’, tremendous for ‘great’, sadism for ‘cruelty’, and unthinkable for ‘undesirable’ were verbicides. Another way is verbiage, by which I here mean the use of a word as a promise to pay which is never going to be kept. The use of significant as if it were an absolute, and with no intention of ever telling us what the thing is significant of, is an example.
Warnie arrived home in October, and when Jack returned to The Kilns for the weekends he found his brother at work on his fifth book about the ancien régime. His fourth, Louis XIV, had been published on 29 May 1959, and the new one was to be called The Scandalous Regent: A Life of Philippe, Duc d’Orléans 1674–23 and of his Family. On Saturday, 3 December, Jack went out for lunch with two fellow Inklings, Humphrey Havard and James Dundas-Grant, and over the next few weeks there were dinners with Austin and Katharine Farrer, Colin and Christian Hardie, Nevill Coghill, and other friends.
Lewis returned to Cambridge immediately after Christmas for a meeting at St Catharine’s College of the Commission to Revise the Psalter during 28–30 December. He had left Warnie deep in seventeenth-century France, and Warnie’s fertile period continued. The Scandalous Regent was published on 7 April 1961, and he was already rereading the memoirs of the diplomat and adventurer, the Chevalier d’Arvieux. ‘I began to re-read Arvieux and make notes on what I read, with an eye to manufacturing a book out of him,’ he wrote on 13 January 1961. ‘I see I last read Arvieux in 1930: how little I then imagined that I would ever live to be the author of five books on my pet subject!’
In Cambridge Jack faced a heavy winter of lectures. His twice-weekly lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’ were followed by eight lectures on Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Several times during the term he met with Professor D. Winton Thomas to work on the Psalms, and on 28 February and 1 March he joined the rest of the Commission at Lambeth Palace. February 23 was the birthday of Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), whose library and diary are among the great treasures of Magdalene College. Lewis was invited to give a talk on Pepys that evening. Richard Ladborough, the Pepys Librarian, said of the occasion:
It is always a matter of astonishment to me that during the whole of his period at Magdalene, Cambridge, he should only once have visited the Pepys Library, and that for only twenty minutes when incited to do so by two eminent Oxford visitors. And yet he read the whole of Pepys’s Diary with insight and, of course, with intelligence, and made one of the best speeches on Pepys I have ever heard. This was in hall at the annual dinner held to celebrate Pepys’s birthday. Pepys in fact was a late acquaintance of his, and he took it for granted, with his usual modesty, that his hearers knew the text as well as he did.
Halfway through Easter Term 1961 Lewis learned that Arthur Greeves was planning a visit to England and wanted to spend a few days with him. ‘Your letter has brightened my whole sky,’ Lewis wrote with obvious delight on 8 May. ‘This time you shall have a double-bed nearly as broad as it’s long.’ On 22 June Lewis and his driver collected Arthur from London and returned with him to Oxford. Writing to Arthur on 30 June, he described their two days together as ‘one of the happiest times I’ve had for many a long day’. Arthur was worried about his old friend, and scribbled a note for himself saying Jack ‘was looking very ill’.
Lewis was ill. Immediately following Arthur’s visit Lewis went to the Acland Nursing Home where he was examined by Mr (later Sir) John Badenoch,* Director of Clinical Studies in the University of Oxford, and a consultant physician with the Oxfordshire Health Authority. ‘My trouble’, he told Arthur on 27 June, ‘has been diagnosed as one very common at our time of life, namely an enlarged prostate gland. I shall soon be in a nursing home for the necessary operation.’ The operation was set for Sunday, 2 July. In the end Mr Badenoch decided it was too dangerous. Jack’s kidneys were infected as well, and he was suffering from toxaemia, which caused cardiac irregularities. He was fitted with a catheter and put on a low-protein diet. Lewis loved fish, and he was discouraged from eating even that. In September, when Roger Lancelyn Green suggested coming down for a visit, Lewis was still waiting for the doctors to decide whether they would operate. He wrote to Green on 6 September:
It’s a bit tricky. I am awaiting an operation on my prostate: but as this trouble upset my kidneys and my heart, these have to be set right before the surgeon can get to work. Meanwhile, I live on a no-protein diet, wear a catheter, sleep in a chair, and have to stay on the ground floor. I’m quite capable of having a guest, but it depends on how the weekly blood-tests go. This means that, for all I know, it might come just when you want to be here so I think you’d better make alternative arrangements, which could be abandoned in favour of coming to the Kilns if, when the time comes, I should be here and not in the Acland. I’d hate to miss the chance of a visit from you if it turns out to be feasible. Is this all too bothersome?
You needn’t pity me too much. I am in no pain and I quite enjoy the hours of uninterrupted reading which I now get.
For the last six months Jack had been planning a trip to Scotland with Jean Wakeman and the boys. Now it had to be called off. Lewis was also finding it difficult to know what was best for his elder stepson. Unlike Douglas, who went sometimes to the parish church, Holy Trinity, in Headington Quarry, David had been interested in Judaism since he was eleven. The boy was now trying to understand the faith that Joy’s parents had abandoned. He was also devoted to not being English, and this as well as a need for an identity led him to memorize the conjugations of Hebrew irregular verbs during the Greek lessons at Magdalen College School. Joy had encouraged him to have Hebrew lessons, and Lewis entirely approved.
Lewis knew what it was like to work hard, and he admired David’s efforts to learn. He allowed him to have private lessons in Hebrew from Ronald May, who was working as a proof-reader for the Oxford University Press and who later taught at the Oxford Centre for Post-Graduate Hebrew Studies. At the same time that David was being taught Hebrew, he started to learn Yiddish by himself. One of the world’s leading Yiddish scholars, Professor Chone Shmeruk of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, was in Oxford during the winter of 1961–2 and gave him lessons in Yiddish. It was an important day when David passed the Hebrew O-level examination. He began attending the Jewish Synagogue in Oxford in 1961.
Lewis was not well enough to go back to Cambridge for Michaelmas Term 1961, but stayed at home with his brother and the boys. Warnie had been a teetotaller since his return from Ireland the previous September, and we learn from his diary that he finished his book on d’Arvieux on 9 August 1961. It was published on 30 November as Levantine Adventurer: The Travels and Missions of the Chevalier d’Arvieux, 1653–1697.
An operation was still impossible, and Mr Badenoch arranged for Lewis to receive blood transfusions every few weeks. Warnie wrote to Mary Willis Shelburne on 7 October:
The result was that he came home a week ago most definitely improved; with not only the permission but the encouragement of his doctors, he now gets up in the morning and cooks his own breakfast, and every day he goes out for half an hour’s walk. Better still, he has been put on a more generous diet and enjoys his meals. But perhaps the best sign is that he tells me he is getting very bored with invalid life and is itching to get back to work. As for the impending operation, the surgeon now talks of it as a thing quite in the future – six, or even twelve months ahead he says. Which naturally is an enormous relief to me, for if they are taking this view there cannot be anything very urgent the matter.
Two days later Lewis wrote to his colleague at Magdalene, Richard Ladborough: ‘I grow quite homesick for college and very much hope that tho’ not good for much, I’ll be back in January. I haven’t had too bad a time and have re-read all the long books … which one never has time to read when in health. But one grows weary of leisure in the end.’ This, however, proved impossible, and soon the question was whether he would be well enough to go back in March 1962. He explained his problem to his pupil Francis Warner in a letter of 6 December 1961: ‘The position is that they can’t operate on my prostate till they’ve got my heart and kidneys right, and it begins to look as if they can’t get my heart and kidneys right till they operate on my prostate. So we’re in what an examinee, by a happy slip of the pen, called “a viscous circle”. Still, it is not quite closed. Meanwhile, I have no pain and am neither depressed nor bored.’
In the end, Lewis had to ask someone else to supervise Francis Warner. But the years they worked together were happy ones for both of them, and when replying to a letter from his pupil’s mother, Nancy Warner, on 26 October 1963, Lewis said of Francis: ‘He is not only a very promising scholar but the best mannered man of his generation I have ever met.’
An Experiment in Criticism was published on 13 October 1961, and he wrote to Kathleen Raine on 21 October: ‘My Experiment has elicited fan mail from a few Cambridge undergraduates. This was a hopeful surprise – can it be that the tide is turning at last? I’d write more but I’ve just had a blood transfusion and am feeling drowsy. Dracula must have led a horrid life!’ It was not only Cambridge undergraduates who thought well of the book. It was highly praised by most reviewers. Near the end of the book Lewis mentions the evaluative school of criticism, with particular emphasis on what he called ‘the Vigilant school of critics’:
To them criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene. They see all clear thinking, all sense of reality, and all fineness of living, threatened on every side by propaganda, by advertisement, by film and television … The printed word is most subtly dangerous, able ‘if it were possible, to deceive the very elect’, not in obvious trash beyond the pale but in authors who appear … to be ‘literary’ and well within the pale … Against this the Vigilant school are our watchdogs or detectives … They are entirely honest, and wholly in earnest. They believe they are smelling out and checking a very great evil. They could sincerely say like St Paul, ‘Woe to me if I preach not the gospel’: ‘Woe to me if I do not seek out vulgarity, superficiality, and false sentiment, and expose them wherever they lie hidden.’
Christopher Derrick wrote in the Catholic periodical, The Tablet:
This is a plea for a resolutely low-church attitude to criticism, and already it has drawn some angry gunfire from representatives of the high and powerful priesthood which it threatens. The point is that this cultural priesthood not only offers … something rather like a surrogate religion, but also creates in its observants an habitual attitude of anxious prickly suspicion towards books, and even towards life and the universe at large. Dr Lewis insists that this is a bad thing, that imaginative literature offers an immensely valuable ‘enlargement of our being’ … He is wonderfully right; for those in favour of happiness but distrustful of politics and the elevated disapproving mind, his book is a charter and a liberation.
The particular passage which offers ‘a charter and a liberation’ from the Vigilants – and now the Deconstructionists! – is one of the most moving passages Lewis ever wrote:
The primary impulse of each is to maintain and aggrandize himself. The secondary impulse is to go out of the self, to correct its provincialism and heal its loneliness. In love, in virtue, in the pursuit of knowledge, and in the reception of the arts, we are doing this. Obviously this process can be described either as an enlargement or as a temporary annihilation of the self. But that is an old paradox; ‘he that loseth his life shall save it’ …
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
Over the next few months Lewis enjoyed the attention of many old friends. Humphrey Havard knew he loved little rides in the country, and on Mondays he and Jim Dundas-Grant collected him and took him to the Lamb and Flag in St Giles for a pint, after which they would go out to the Trout at Godstow for lunch. Lewis managed to get to church on Sundays but his parish priest, Father Ronald Head,* always celebrated the Eucharist at The Kilns on Wednesday mornings. The practice of the Church of England is for the clergyman to take the elements consecrated at the Communion service to the sick person. But Lewis liked hearing the entire Communion service. So before Fr Head arrived, Lewis cleared his desk, which served as an altar on which Holy Communion was celebrated according to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer.
Some of the many who visited him at home were Owen Barfield, Cecil Harwood, Roger Lancelyn Green, George Sayer, John Wain, Kenneth Tynan and Christopher Derrick. When not seeing friends, Lewis reread many old favourites including War and Peace and the Orlando Furioso. Just before Christmas he read, and greatly enjoyed, Thomas Merton’s No Man is an Island (1955).
Lewis was not well enough to return to Cambridge for the Lent Term of 1962. Writing to Mary Willis Shelburne on 17 January 1962 about all her problems, he said:
Alas! Advances in hygiene have made most of us live longer but other things have made old age harsher than it ever was before. It is a pity that the old usually dislike one another. In your position I myself would prefer a ‘Home’ – or almost anything – to solitude. Your view reminds me of a dipsomaniac retired major I once knew who refused the suggestion that he should try A.A. on the ground that ‘it would be full of retired majors’! I am better, but that only means more nearly ripe for a big operation.
The ‘retired major’ was in fact his beloved Warnie. The tall bookcases in Warnie’s room had profile tops, with deep ‘troughs’ running their length. When the bookcases were moved in 1964, the many leaflets Jack had given Warnie about Alcoholics Anonymous, as well as hundreds of empty half-pint whisky bottles, were discovered in the ‘troughs’.
Lewis’s stepson, David Gresham, was now eighteen and not doing well at Magdalen College School. He was encouraged by Rabbi M.Y. Young, a master at Carmel College, a Jewish secondary school in Wallingford, to visit a yeshiva – a Jewish traditional academy devoted to the study of rabbinic literature. On 10 April he went up to see the yeshiva at Gateshead in the north of England. A rabbi there advised him to go to a Jewish school in London to finish his A-level examinations before going to a yeshiva. On 15 April he went to London, and after a few months he became a student at the North West London Talmudical College in 961 Finchley Road, where he remained for a year.
By Easter Term 1962 the doctors had decided that Lewis might never be fit for surgery. He had developed a tolerance for his condition, however, and they saw no reason why he might not be able to carry on indefinitely as a semi-invalid. So, with their blessing, he returned to Cambridge on 24 April, and during Easter Term he resumed his twice-weekly lectures on The Faerie Queene. Over the following months he met with Bishop Chase and Professor D. Winton Thomas several times to discuss the Psalter. When he returned home in July Warnie was already in Drogheda. (‘I drank from 22nd June until 27th August while I was in Ireland,’ Warnie wrote in his diary for 2 January 1963, ‘then was again a teetotaller from 28th August to 31st December, 126 days. So out of 365 days I was T.T. for 298 days. A poor performance compared with 1961.’) Jack hoped to manage a holiday in Ireland, but it was not possible. He wrote to Sister Penelope on 23 June 1962:
It is kind of you to want to know my plight (by the way, apart from everything else, what a bore the subject of one’s own health is! Like wearisomely enumerating for the police all the contents of a lost handbag). It begins to look as if I shall not be fit for that operation in any reasonable time – doctor’s euphemism for NEVER? – but I’ve apparently developed a ‘tolerance’ for the state of my blood and kidneys and can carry on, on a low diet and strict economy of exertion. So they let me [go] back to Cambridge last term ‘as an experiment’. The experiment, Laus Deo, has proved a wholly unexpected success and I am now very definitely better than I’ve ever been since last June …
You know I’m on the commission for revising the prayer book Psalter? It has been delightful work, with delightful colleagues, and I’ve learned a lot. We finished our first draft of Psalm 151 a fortnight ago.
As ever, Lewis found ink ‘the great cure for all human ills’ and he passed a pleasant summer at home. While he wrote most of his letters on the desk in the common room – the one which doubled as an altar – he had another desk in his bedroom upstairs. He could leave his work spread across the top without fear of it being disturbed. It was here that he had for some time been turning his highly respected lectures on the ‘Prolegomena to Medieval and Renaissance Literature’ into a book. He completed it in July. He called the book The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and it was dedicated to one of the friends who had heard those lectures in the 1930s, Roger Lancelyn Green. Besides numerous visitors, Lewis enjoyed a few excursions in and around Oxford. He had seen his old friend, Owen Barfield, a good deal recently, and on 12 July Barfield drove him over to Long Crendon for a visit to Ruth Pitter. This was so successful that on 15 August he invited Miss Pitter to visit him at The Kilns. Times had changed since he gave his wartime broadcasts, and on 11 September the BBC came to The Kilns where they recorded Lewis reading an essay on Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.
These peaceful times were suddenly interrupted. Bill Gresham had been having trouble for some time with cataracts. Having lost the sight in one eye, he was now threatened with total blindness. He discovered, at the same time, that he had cancer of the tongue and throat. On Thursday 13 September he left his home in New Rochelle, New York, and took a room at the Dixie Hotel in New York City. There he took an overdose of sleeping pills, and was found dead the next morning, 14 September. Lewis had now to tell the boys about their father.
On 8 October Lewis returned to Cambridge to resume his lectures on ‘English Literature 1300–1500’. These were the last of the famous ‘Prolegomena’ lectures he was to give. Tolkien wrote to Jack twice during the term. He continued to regret his marriage to Joy, but he loved Lewis and he invited him to a dinner being given to celebrate the publication of English and Medieval Studies Presented to J.R.R. Tolkien on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday (1962), to which Lewis had contributed an article on ‘The Anthropological Approach’. On 20 November 1962, Lewis replied: ‘Dear Tollers – What a nice letter. I also like beer less than I did, tho’ I have retained the taste for general talk. But I shan’t be at the Festschrift dinner. I wear a catheter, live on a low protein diet, and go early to bed. I am, if not a lean, at least a slippered, pantaloon.’
As they prepared for Christmas at The Kilns, Jack was trying to find a new school for his younger stepson, Douglas. The boy had neither liked nor performed well at Magdalen College School, and Lewis was trying to find a ‘grinder’, or tutor, who could help him pass his General Certificate of Education exams. Lewis turned for help to his godson, Laurence Harwood. He, like Douglas, was more of a ‘doer’ than an academic, and he had landed happily and solidly on his feet working for the National Trust. Writing to Laurence on 14 December 1962, Lewis said:
Toujours Douglas! It is quite possible that there may be a hiatus of a term before the grinder we have in view can take him, and anything would be better than another term at Magdalen. He himself has suggested a term of practical work on a farm. I wonder could you, thro’ your contacts, find him such a place? (He was born 1945 – good health – lazy only about book-work, otherwise very serviceable.) If there were any choice, the lonelier the place – the further from cinemas, pubs etc – the better. Not that he (in any sinister sense) ‘drinks’: but he is desperately social and time-wasting!
Tolkien wrote to Lewis again a few days before Christmas. ‘Thanks for your most kind letter,’ Jack replied on 24 December. ‘All my philosophy of history hangs upon a sentence of your own, “Deeds were done which were not wholly in vain.” Is it still possible amid this ghastly racket of “Xmas” to exchange greetings for the Feast of the Nativity? If so, mine, very warm, to both of you.’
By the middle of January 1963 Lewis had found a place for Douglas at a small private school, Applegarth, in Godalming, Surrey. Jack then had to spend a few days in the Acland, after which he returned to Cambridge. There, on 7 February 1963, he had a visit from the painter, Juliet Pannet. The Illustrated London Times had commissioned her to do a likeness of Lewis in pastels and he agreed to sit for the portrait, which appeared in the issue of 27 July 1963.
While Lewis was writing Letters to Malcolm the religious world of England was suddenly caught up in what Adrian Hastings in his History of English Christianity called a mood of ‘heady and optimistic novelty’. The radical Bishop of Woolwich, J.A.T. Robinson,* had three years before defended the publication of the unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), claiming that Lawrence, in the adulterous ‘sex relationship’ in the book, was trying ‘to portray this relation as in a real sense something sacred, as in a real sense an act of holy communion’. Now, led by The Observer newspaper, the Bishop of Woolwich was caught up in the biggest ‘media event’ of all time. Nearly a million people bought their copy of The Observer on 17 March 1963 so that they could read a special extract from the Bishop of Woolwich’s Honest to God in which he stated that if Christianity were to mean anything in the future to more than ‘a tiny religious remnant’, it would have to learn a new language in which ‘the most fundamental categories of our theology – of God, of the supernatural, and of religion itself – must go into the melting pot’. He suggested that we are even called to a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in which ‘the God of traditional theology’ must be given up ‘in any form’. Lewis was one of several The Observer asked to comment on the book, and for the issue of 24 March he wrote a piece beginning
The Bishop of Woolwich will disturb most of us Christian laymen less than he anticipates. We have long abandoned belief in a God who sits on a throne in a localized heaven. We call that belief anthropomorphism, and it was officially condemned before our time. There is something about this in Gibbon … We have always thought of God as being not only ‘in’ and ‘above’, but also ‘below’ us: as the depth of ground. We can imaginatively speak of our Father ‘in heaven’ yet also of the everlasting arms that are ‘beneath’. We do not understand why the Bishop is so anxious to canonize the one image and forbid the other. We admit his freedom to use which he prefers. We claim our freedom to use both.
In his History of English Christianity, Hastings commented:
It is possible that without the almost fortuitous publicity … the book might never have made the national, and indeed international impression that it did. It went through four impressions that March and nearly a million copies were sold within three years. Only the Bible could rival it. English religion of the 1960s will always remain more associated with Honest to God than with any other book … In this, as in several of his other books, John Robinson was with little doubt the most effective writer of popular religious literature since C.S. Lewis, if in many ways Lewis’s opposite. Both were highly persuasive. Lewis was a man for the fifties, suspicious of modernity, unwilling to allow the smallest particle of traditional doctrine to be thrown overboard unexamined. Robinson was a man for the sixties, apparently willing to de-mythologize almost anything of which modernity might conceivably be suspicious.
One of those who urged Lewis to give further vent to his thoughts on Honest to God was Edward T. Dell, the editor of The Episcopalian magazine in New York. ‘I had rather keep off Bishop Robinson’s book,’ Lewis replied on 22 April. ‘I should find it hard to write of such a man with charity, nor do I want to increase the publicity.’ Mr Dell did not give up. ‘The only solution in such a situation’, he argued in his letter of 25 April, ‘is a fair analysis of what the book says and some sharp and accurate criticism of the ideas … I was remiss in not mentioning an honorarium in my earlier letter. The amount is $200.00.’ Lewis replied on 29 April:
I could hardly do so now that you have mentioned the fee! What would you yourself think of me if I did? There will be implied answers to some of Robinson’s nonsense in parts of a book on prayer which I’ve just finished, and I can ‘do my bit’ much better that way. A great deal of my utility has depended on my having kept out of all dog-fights between professing schools of ‘Christian’ thought. I’d sooner preserve that abstinence to the end.
As mentioned before, Lewis had been trying since 1952 to write a book on prayer, but without success. There were things he had long wanted to say about prayer, but he could not find the right form. Defending the clearly defined dogmas of the Church was easy for him, but he could not treat prayer in quite the same way. Sometime during the winter of 1963 he thought of using, once again, the form that had worked so well with The Screwtape Letters. After this the book on prayer – Letters to Malcolm – fairly wrote itself. It was finished in April, and a typescript was sent to his publisher soon afterwards.
‘Respect and admire you as I do,’ Jock Gibb wrote on 13 June, ‘this “Letters to Malcolm” … has knocked me flat. 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!’ When he asked for suggestions in writing a blurb for the book-jacket, Lewis replied on 28 June: ‘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: i.e. the author does not claim to be teaching … Some passages are controversial but this is almost an accident. The wayfaring Christian cannot quite ignore recent Anglican theology when it has been built as a barricade across the high road.’
Two of the modernists whom Lewis believed to be actively building the barricade were the ‘de-mythologists’, Rudolf Bultmann and the Bishop of Woolwich (or ‘The Bishop of Woolworth’, as Lewis called him). Lewis says to Malcolm in Letter 4,
Never … let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions; each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very lightly, continually murmuring ‘Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou’, the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naïf image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. What soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard?
It was very difficult to draw Lewis out on the subject of liturgy, but he made it clear in the first letter that he had little sympathy for those clergymen who have the ‘Liturgical Fidget’ and attempt to lure people to church by ‘incessant brightenings, lightenings, lengthenings, abridgements, simplifications and complications of the service’. ‘My whole liturgiological position’, he said, ‘really boils down to an entreaty for permanence and uniformity.’ Fortunately for Lewis, his vicar, Fr Head, was also opposed to the ‘Liturgical Fidget’ and it was from him that Lewis learned a great deal about what the modernizing revisers of the Prayer Book were up to.
After his explicit references to Purgatory in The Great Divorce, a television interviewer asked Lewis if he planned to join the Roman Catholic Church. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘you do believe in Purgatory.’ ‘But not’, answered Lewis, ‘the Romish doctrine!’ He was referring to the Thirty-Nine Articles in the Prayer Book. They date from 1563, and are a set of doctrinal formulae finally accepted by the Anglican Church in its attempt to define its dogmatic position in relation to the controversies of the sixteenth century. Article XXII states: ‘The Romish Doctrine concerning Purgatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints, is a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warrant of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.’
Rather than go on denying the rumours that he was leaving the Anglican for the Catholic Church, Lewis decided to explain his views on Purgatory to Malcolm. In Letter 20 he says:
Mind you, the Reformers had good reason for throwing doubt on ‘the Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory’ as that Romish doctrine had then become … If you turn from Dante’s Purgatorio to the Sixteenth Century you will be appalled by the degradation … The right view returns magnificently in Newman’s Dream. There, if I remember rightly, the saved soul, at the very foot of the throne, begs to be taken away and cleansed. It cannot bear for a moment longer ‘With its darkness to affront that light.’ Religion has reclaimed Purgatory.
In Cardinal Newman’s Dream, Gerontius and his protecting Angel approach the Throne, while the Angel of Agony who strengthened Christ in Gethsemane prays for him. Then Gerontius, aware of his need for purification before he sees God face to face, begs to be sent to Purgatory:
Take me away, and in the lowest deep
There let me be,
And there in hope the lone night watches keep,
Told out for me.
There, motionless and happy in my pain,
Lone, not forlorn, –
There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast,
Which ne’er can cease
To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest
Of its Sole Peace.
There will I sing my absent Lord and Love: –
Take me away,
That sooner I may rise, and go above,
And see Him in the truth of everlasting day.
The poem ends with the Angel taking Gerontius to Purgatory, as he had asked. The Angel comforts him with words Lewis found very moving:
Farewell, but not for ever! brother dear,
Be brave and patient on thy bed of sorrow;
Swiftly shall pass thy night of trial here,
And I will come and wake thee on the morrow.
‘Our souls demand Purgatory, don’t they?’ said Lewis to Malcolm. ‘Would it not break the heart if God said to us,
‘It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into the joy’? Should we not reply, ‘With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I’d rather be cleaned first.’ ‘It may hurt, you know’ – ‘Even so, sir.’ … My favourite image on this matter comes from the dentist’s chair. I hope that when the tooth of life is drawn and I am ‘coming round’, a voice will say, ‘Rinse your mouth out with this.’ This will be Purgatory.
Before Lewis went home for the Easter vacation he planned a trip to his native Ireland. As he explained to Arthur, he could no longer carry his own bag, and was bringing Douglas with him. Eventually it was decided that he, Warnie and Douglas would go over on 15 July. ‘Bravo!’ he wrote on 22 March after Arthur had found them rooms. ‘We’re both too old to let our remaining chances slip!’
Unfortunately, by the time Lewis arrived home from Cambridge on Friday, 7 June, Warnie had anticipated the trip and was already in Ireland. That afternoon Lewis gave tea to a young man, Walter Hooper, from the small tobacco town of Reidsville, North Carolina. Hooper was thirty-two and had been corresponding with Lewis since 1954. He was now teaching English at the University of Kentucky and writing an academic work on Lewis for an American series on English authors. While Lewis had advised him that it was safer to write about ‘the unanswering dead’, he said he would be happy to see him. Hooper remembers the delightful way in which Lewis broke the ice between them:
I arrived at The Kilns about tea time, a favourite time of the day for Lewis who was a great, even a monumental, tea drinker. I too was a lover of tea, but my intake had never been as gargantuan as his. As soon as we’d finished one pot of tea, Lewis would go to the kitchen and make another, and another. I was quite a shy young Southern American, and after what seemed gallons of it, I asked if I might be shown the ‘bathroom.’ I’d only just arrived in England, and I didn’t know that in most homes the bathroom and the toilet are separate rooms.
With a touch of mock formality Lewis conducted me to what was really the bathroom – the only thing in it was a bathtub. He flung down several towels, produced several tablets of soap and, before closing the door on me, asked if I had everything I needed for my ‘bath.’ ‘Oh, yes!’ I said with some alarm. By this time I was very uncomfortable, and I finally got up enough nerve to go back in the sitting-room and tell him it wasn’t a ‘bath’ I wanted. Lewis was roaring with laughter, and he said, ‘Now that will break you of those silly American euphemisms. Let’s start again. Where do you want to go?’
I was catapulted into a far more interesting life than I’d imagined was to be had, and pretty soon we were talking about everything under the sun, Lewis constantly making verbal distinctions, and catching me out on logical points. Its effect was to make me love the man so much that by the time the meeting ended some hours later I foresaw a life ahead of me that would be dull in comparison. Lewis took me to the bus stop, stopping at his local, the Ampleforth Arms, which was just beside it. We’d just finished our pint when the bus arrived. I thanked Lewis for giving me so much of his time. He looked surprised and said ‘You’re not getting away! You’re coming to the Inklings meeting on Monday.’
The meeting at the Lamb and Flag was a success, and after this they settled into a more or less regular routine of thrice-weekly meetings: Monday at the Lamb and Flag, Thursdays at The Kilns, and Sundays when they went to church together.
Lewis enjoyed a number of treats during the summer. On 29 June Dr Havard took him to Cirencester to hear the music of Donald Swann’s and David Marsh’s Perelandra. ‘He loved it when he heard it,’ said Donald Swann. ‘It was sung by myself at the piano together with a team of singers who exemplified parts of it. Later he wrote that it moved him to tears and I know it would have been the most wonderful collaboration if we could have reached the point where he fed his ideas to producers and directors.’
At the beginning of July Lewis was describing himself as ‘pretty well an invalid’. When Hooper went out to The Kilns on Sunday morning, 14 July, he found him in his dressing-gown, looking exceedingly ill. He could hardly sit up, and after asking for tea, he could not hold the cup. The cigarette kept dropping from his fingers. ‘He told me,’ remembers Hooper, ‘that he’d be going into the Acland next day for a blood transfusion, and he asked if I’d stop in England and act as his private secretary, beginning immediately. While I was very worried about him, I was enormously gratified by his offer and of course I accepted.’
Mary Willis Shelburne, too, was ill at this time and was clamouring for Lewis’s attention. He was now writing to her twice a week. ‘I go into hospital this afternoon,’ he said to her on 15 July. ‘The loss of all mental concentration is what I dislike most. I fell asleep 3 times during your letter and found it very hard to understand! Don’t expect to hear much from me. You might as well expect a Lecture on Hegel from a drunk man.’
He went to the Acland Nursing Home for a blood transfusion that afternoon, and he was still there at 5 p.m. when he had a heart attack and went into a coma. The doctors informed the Farrers that Lewis was dying, and they got in touch with other friends. At 2 p.m. the next day the Reverend Michael Watts of the Church of St Mary Magdalen gave him extreme unction, the Church’s practice of anointing with oil when the patient is in extremis.
To everyone’s surprise, Lewis woke from his coma an hour later and asked for his tea. Austin Farrer and Walter Hooper hurried round to the Acland. Hooper found him ‘looking as though he’d woken from a twenty-year sleep’. ‘Noticing our worried looks, he said, “Why do you look so anxious? Is there anything wrong?” “You’ve been asleep for quite a long while. We were concerned about you,” replied Austin. “I do not think,” said Jack vigorously, “that it could be argued that I am a very well man!”’
The next day Austin Farrer returned to give Lewis the Sacrament, after which Lewis sent Hooper out to buy writing paper and set him down to answer his correspondence. For the first week he was in the Acland the poison from his infected kidney affected his mind and he was sometimes very confused. During that week his visitors included Tolkien and Maureen Blake. In February of 1963 Maureen had inherited, through her father, a baronetcy and an estate in Caithness, Scotland. She had not seen Lewis since this happened, and on the day she visited him in the nursing home he had not recognized anyone. Realizing this, Maureen approached the bed and touched his hand. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘it is Maureen.’ ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs.’ ‘Oh, Jack,’ she said, ‘how could you remember that?’ ‘On the contrary,’ he replied, ‘how could I forget a fairy-tale?’
George Sayer visited Lewis often in the Acland, and remembers that when he saw him on 18 July he
asked me if I had met Walter Hooper. ‘I’ve engaged him as my secretary,’ he said. ‘I want you to like him. I want all my friends to like him. He is a young American. Very devoted and charming. He is almost too anxious to please, but no fool. Certainly not a fool. I must have someone in the house when I go home. Warnie has deserted me and David and Douglas have gone away. There will be hundreds of letters. I must have a secretary.
George Sayer and the Farrers made several attempts to contact Warnie, but without success. However, Lewis arranged for Walter to move into The Kilns on 26 July, and when he came home on 6 August, he had not only Walter but a male nurse, Alec Ross, in case he was taken ill during the night. For the next six weeks or so Lewis’s health seemed steadily to improve. He realized that he would not be able to return to Cambridge and, having resigned his Chair, on 14 August he sent Walter and Douglas to Cambridge to clear his college rooms and sort out his books and papers. Not since 1925 had all his many books and other belongings been in one place, and this meant disposing of many items and rearranging The Kilns.
Austin and Katharine Farrer later recalled the afternoon in August when they went to The Kilns for tea. While Hooper was out of the room, Mrs Farrer said to Lewis, ‘Jack, Austin and I have always thought you guarded your private life very jealously. Is it uncomfortable having Walter living in your house?’ He answered, ‘But Walter is part of my private life!’
That autumn Hooper had to return to the United States to teach one final term before rejoining Lewis in January. When he asked Mr Badenoch about Lewis’s condition, Badenoch replied: ‘He’s full of surprises. He could die at any moment, or he could live for years.’ Douglas had to go back to Applegarth, and David, who had now left the North West London Talmudical College, went to New York where he studied at the Yeshiva Rabbi Chaim Berlin. But Alec Ross was still there, along with Paxford and Mrs Miller. Lewis wrote to Sister Penelope on 17 September:
I was unexpectedly revived from a long coma – and perhaps the almost continuous prayers of my friends did it – but it would have been a luxuriously easy passage and one almost … regrets having the door shut in one’s face. Ought we to honour Lazarus rather than Stephen as the protomartyr? To be brought back and have all one’s dying to do again was rather hard.
If you die first, and if ‘prison visiting’ is allowed, come down and look me up in Purgatory.
It is all rather fun – solemn fun – isn’t it?
During the autumn Fr Head came twice a week to give Lewis Communion, and he greatly enjoyed the company of friends. Roger Lancelyn Green visited The Kilns on 26 September and recorded in his diary: ‘Jack was very well, to my delight, in spite of his being near death last month [sic] – and we had a marvellous evening of talk.’ ‘My last fear has been taken from me,’ Lewis told Green. ‘I had always been terrified at the thought of going mad: but I was completely mad for a week and never realized it. Indeed, I was happy all the time. And death would have been so easy: I was nearly there – and almost regret having been brought back!’
Another visitor was Tolkien, who came with his son Fr John Tolkien, a Catholic priest. As Fr Tolkien recalled: ‘We drove over to The Kilns for what turned out to be a very excellent time together for about an hour. I remember the conversation was very much about the Morte d’Arthur and whether trees died.’
But the flame of the candle was only burning up brightly before sinking for the last time. Lewis had those few extra months in which to put all his affairs in order, arrange for trustees and guardians to look after his brother’s and his stepsons’ affairs after he was gone, and tidy up the loose ends of his literary work. The Discarded Image should have been published that autumn, but there had been some mistake over the printing of it and over its index, and final revised proofs only arrived in October; Letters to Malcolm, though written afterwards, was already in the press.
He was also well enough to write his last article. He wrote to the editor of the New York Saturday Evening Post on 17 October:
I’d like to have a try at that article, but must warn you that I may fail … It would be impossible to discuss ‘the right to happiness’ without discussing a formula that is rather sacred to Americans about ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’. I’d do so with respect. But I’d have to point out that it can only mean ‘A right to pursue happiness by legitimate means’, i.e. ‘people have a right to do whatever they have a right to do’. Would your public like this?
The article was written with Lewis’s usual clarity and depth of thought, and despatched to New York, where ‘We Have No “Right to Happiness”’ appeared in the Saturday Evening Post of 21–28 December 1963.
The St Martin’s summer was drawing to a close even as he wrote. His beloved Warnie – the Archpiggiebotham – returned home at the beginning of October. Warnie picks up the story:
Early in October, it became apparent to both of us that Jack was facing the onset of death. Yet those last weeks were not unhappy ones. Joy had left us, and once more as in bygone days we had no one but each other to turn to for comfort. The wheel had come full circle. Again we were in the new ‘little end room’, shutting out from our talk the ever present knowledge that the holidays were ending, and a new term fraught with unknown possibilities awaited us both.
Jack faced the prospect bravely and calmly. ‘I have done all I wanted to do, and I’m ready to go,’ he said one evening. Only once did he show any regret or reluctance: this was when I told him that the morning’s mail included an invitation to deliver the Romanes Lecture.* An expression of sadness passed over his face and for a moment there was silence – then, ‘Send them a very polite refusal,’ he said. It was obvious that he would have wished to end his long academic career by being able to fulfil that engagement worthily.
Lewis had refused all honours, such as the CBE, at the disposal of any government of whatever political persuasion; but the Honorary Fellow of University and Magdalen Colleges, Oxford, and of Magdalene College, Cambridge, the Honorary D.D. of St Andrews and Honorary D.Litt. of Manchester, Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and holder of the Gollancz Memorial Prize for Literature and the Carnegie Medal for the best children’s book of 1956, would indeed have rounded off his career worthily as Romanes Lecturer.
Even if he himself knew that death was drawing near, Lewis kept the knowledge from his friends, though he did his best to see as many of them as possible, almost as if to say goodbye to each. ‘I am finding retirement full of compensation,’ he wrote to Professor Basil Willey on 22 October. ‘It is lovely to reflect that I am under no obligation to read Rowse on the Sonnets. I have re-read the Iliad instead … I delight to be visited – the sooner, and oftener, the better.’ Dr Ladborough wrote:
Only a fortnight before his death I received a card from him from Oxford. ‘Have been reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Wow what a book! Come to lunch on Friday (fish) and tell me about it.’ I’m glad to say that I went, and of course it was Jack who told me about it; and not the other way round. But C.S. Lewis reading Les Liaisons Dangereuses when on the point of death! All in all, I don’t think it uncharacteristic. I somehow felt it was the last time we should meet, and when he escorted me, with his usual courtesy, to the door, I think he felt so too. Never was a man better prepared.
One of Lewis’s typical cards clinching an invitation was sent to Green on 1 November: ‘Good. Dinner-bem-breakfast it is. Fri – Sat. 15–16 Nov, and most welcome you will be. J.’ Green reached The Kilns in time for dinner on 15 November. Lewis had just been correcting the proofs of ‘We Have No “Right to Happiness”’, and was furious that the final paragraph had been altered. He had a call put through to New York, and insisted that it should either be put back as he had written it, or the whole article cancelled.
After dinner they sat and talked as usual. But he was obviously ill, and kept falling asleep – and for alarming intervals apparently ceasing to breathe at all. For the first time ever the talk flagged; and when Warnie brought in the tea about ten o’clock he seemed worried, and suggested that Jack should go to bed. ‘But I don’t want to go to bed!’ expostulated Jack, waking up suddenly. ‘I want to go on talking with Roger – but I suppose I’d better.’
Next morning he was up late, but in time to see his last guest off. As he passed the window Green turned to wave goodbye to Lewis who was sitting at his desk just inside. There was something in that last look both of affection and of farewell that told Green he knew it was ‘goodbye’ indeed – and he groped his way down Kiln Lane blinded with tears.
The following Monday, 18 November, Lewis was better again, and was driven down to the Lamb and Flag for the last time. It so happened that only Colin Hardie was there: but the talk was as animated as it had ever been. ‘Perhaps the best of all such Mondays,’ said Lewis.
His last visitor, on 20 November, was Kaye Webb, editor of Puffin Books, in which The Chronicles of Narnia were appearing. ‘We had a nice talk on Wednesday,’ she wrote to Green, who had arranged the meeting. ‘What a very great and dear man. How I wish I’d had a chance to know him well, but how grateful I am that you “introduced” us to each other. He promised to re-edit the books (connect the things that didn’t tie up) and he asked me to come again … It must be nice to know that you helped him to have that lovely holiday in Greece. He talked about it with such warmth.’
The final picture of Lewis, however, must come from Warnie:
Friday, 22 November 1963, began no differently from any other day for some weeks past. I looked in on Jack soon after six, got a cheerful ‘I’m all right’ and then went about my domestic tasks. He got up at eight and as usual breakfasted in the kitchen in his dressing-gown, after which he took a preliminary survey of his cross-word puzzle. By the time he was dressed I had his mail ready for him and he sat down in his workroom where he answered four letters with his own hand. For some time past he had been finding great difficulty in keeping awake, and finding him asleep in his chair after lunch, I suggested that he would be more comfortable in bed. He agreed, and went there. At four I took him in his tea and had a few words with him, finding him thick in his speech, very drowsy, but calm and cheerful. It was the last time we ever spoke to each other. At five-thirty I heard a crash in his bedroom, and running in, I found him lying unconscious at the foot of his bed. He ceased to breathe some three or four minutes later. The following Friday would have been his sixty-fifth birthday.
Then Aslan turned to them and said: ‘… you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.
‘And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.’
* Donald Ibrahim Swann (1923–94) was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, and soon afterwards began a career as a musician. Besides writing music, he was a gifted singer and accompanist of his own songs. Some of his most popular work was done in collaboration with David Marsh and Michael Flanders who wrote the lyrics to his music. Besides an opera of Perelandra, Swann collaborated with J.R.R. Tolkien on The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle, Music by Donald Swann, Poems by J.R.R. Tolkien (1967).
* Sir John Badenoch (1920–96), who was knighted in 1984, was educated at Rugby and Oriel College, Oxford, where he read Medicine. He was Resident Assistant, Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, Oxford, 1949–56; University Lecturer in Medicine, 1956–85; Director of Clinical Studies, Oxford, 1954–65; and a consultant physician with the Oxfordshire Health Authority, 1956–85.
* The Rev. Canon Ronald Edwin Head (1919–91) was born in London, the son of Alfred and Beatrice Head. He received his BD from King’s College, London in 1949. From there he went on to take a B.Litt. from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1959. His thesis was later published as Royal Supremacy and the Trials of Bishops 1558–1725 (1962). He was ordained in 1950 and served as a curate of St Peter’s, Vauxhall, 1949–52. He was appointed curate of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, in 1952, and he was vicar from 1956 until his retirement in 1990. One of the things Lewis liked most about him was that, while firmly within the Catholic tradition of the Church, he abided by the twin pillars of scripture and tradition. He is buried beside his parents in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, not many yards from the grave of C.S. Lewis.
* The Rt Rev. John Arthur Thomas Robinson (1919–83) was born into a clerical family in Canterbury. He was educated at Marlborough College, and Jesus College, Cambridge. Following his ordination he was Chaplain to Wells Theological College, 1948–51, and afterwards Fellow and Dean of Clare College, Cambridge, 1951–9. In 1959 he was made Bishop of Woolwich, and his interest in the ordination of women, inter-communion and other matters soon caused him to be recognized as the leading radical of the Church of England. Life was never the same for him after he published Honest to God (1963). He was inundated with letters, visitors and speaking engagements. Other popular books followed, but his magnum opus, The Redating of the New Testament (1976), was a serious work of orthodox scholarship.
* The University of Oxford lists a number of special lectures of which the Romanes Lecture is the oldest and the most famous. It was founded in 1891 by George John Romanes of Christ Church, and it is given once a year on some subject, approved by the Vice-Chancellor, relating to science, art or literature.