C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ to do with the subject of this book.’³¹ In a more civilized age this would be accepted as an absolute embargo on prying further into private affairs. But as so many of Lewis’s most personal letters and papers have been published or are available in public collections, we have no choice but to follow up all the available evidence as far as it will take us.

      It does not, in fact, take us very far. Early ‘hostility to the emotions’, aggravated by his (perhaps exaggerated) revulsion against the unsavoury perversions at Malvern, made Lewis excessively wary of ‘the lusts of the flesh’. While he discussed these matters freely with Arthur Greeves, and after his conversion spoke of his early sins with understandable detestation (we may add, with perhaps some exaggeration hovering between a touch of subconscious pride at his regeneration and a very real gratitude to God for helping him to achieve it), the available material gives absolutely no concrete evidence of lapses from chastity in the stricter sense.

Undoubtedly Lewis ‘fell in love’ once or twice in his youth and early manhood, just as naturally as he felt carnal desire for the dancing mistress at Cherbourg – or the various other women whose physical charms, or the lack of them, he discussed with Greeves. Even during the terrible stress of his fifteen months in the Army, several of them with death imminent and probable, he apparently did not waste his pay ‘on prostitutes, restaurants and tailors, as the gentiles do’.³² And none of the more serious love-affairs that he mentions or suggests in letters and diaries seem to have progressed very far.

      The only really overwhelming ‘love-affair’ of his early life, and that to which he may well be referring in Surprised by Joy, was of a kind and took so surprising a turn that it can hardly be classified with the ordinary ‘lusts of the flesh’. His affection for Mrs Moore – his infatuation, as it seemed to his friends and even to his brother who knew him more intimately than any of them – may have started with that incomprehensible passion which attractive middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths: but it very soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute – in many ways a father-substitute also.

When Lewis had been ordered to the front and had telegraphed to his father to come and spend his last day in England with him, Albert Lewis had indeed ‘misunderstood’ the telegram and not come. It might have been a genuine misunderstanding. But in June 1918, when he lay wounded in hospital in London, Lewis wrote several times begging his father to visit him: ‘Come and see me,’ he wrote on 20 June. ‘I am homesick, that is the long and short of it.’³³ Warnie later wrote:

One would have thought that it would have been impossible to resist such an appeal as this. But my father was a very peculiar man in some respects; in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence. Jack remained unvisited, and was deeply hurt at a neglect which he considered inexcusable. Feeling himself to have been rebuffed by his father, he turned to Mrs Moore for the affection which was apparently denied him at home.³⁴

      Lewis was moved from London towards the end of July, to a convalescent home in Ashton Court near Clifton, Bristol, which he chose as it was near Mrs Moore – and there were difficulties in the way of getting into one in Northern Ireland. He was supposed to be there for only two months, but an outbreak of infectious disease which caused the home to be isolated, and his own unexpectedly slow recovery from his wounds, kept him there until mid-October, when he was posted to Ludgershall, near Andover, Hampshire.

Paddy Moore, who had been with the 2nd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, had taken part in resisting the great German attack which began on 21 March 1918. He had last been seen on the morning of 24 March, and by September 1918 he was known to have died at Pargny on that day.^* When definite news of his death had come through Albert Lewis wrote to commiserate. Mrs Moore replied on 1 October 1918: ‘I just lived my life for my son, and it is very hard to go on now … Of the five boys who came out to us so often at Oxford, Jack is the only one left. I feel that I can never do enough for those that are left. Jack has been so good to me. My poor son asked him to look after me if he did not come back. He possesses for a boy of his age such a wonderful power of understanding and sympathy.’³⁵

      Meanwhile Lewis’s first literary venture was taking shape. The embarkation leave in October 1917 had been so curtailed by illness that he was probably able to do little in the way of assembling and copying out his poems during his visit to Belfast. But as soon as he was able to do so in the hospital in London, he set to work on preparing a fair copy that could be typed and sent to a publisher – now with several recent poems to add to those written during the Bookham and Oxford periods – and continued to do so even more industriously when he got to Ashton Court. On 12 September, Lewis wrote to Greeves from Mrs Moore’s home in Ravenswood Road, Bristol:

The best of news! After keeping my MS. for ages Heinemann has actually accepted it … You can imagine how pleased I am, and how eagerly I now look at all Heinemann’s books and wonder what mine will be like. I’m afraid the paper will be poor as it always is now in new books. It is going to be called ‘Spirits in Prison’ by Clive Staples and is mainly strung round the idea that I mentioned to you before – that nature is wholly diabolical and malevolent and that God, if he exists, is outside of and in opposition to the cosmic arrangements.³⁶

On 6 October he was writing to Arthur from Pelham Downs Camp, Ludgershall (near Andover): ‘No, you were wrong, I have not gone on my leave; I was only out for a night at Mrs Moore’s. I have now, however, had my Board, over a month late I’m glad to say, and have been sent for further convalescence to a camp here.’³⁷

      ‘It is terrible to think how quickly an old order changes and how impossible it is to build it up again exactly the same,’ he wrote on 2 November 1918.

I wonder will there be many changes when we meet again? Maureen told me the other day that I was greatly changed since she first knew me, but, with the impenetrable reticence of a child, declined to say in what way … I made a journey to London to see Heinemanns.^* C.S. Evans, the manager, was very nice to me and quite enthusiastic about the book and especially about one piece. John Galsworthy, he said, had read the MS. and wanted to put this piece in a new Quarterly which he is bringing out for disabled soldiers and sailors called Reveille: of course I consented … So at last dreams come to pass and I have sat in the sanctum of a publisher discussing my own book.³⁸

      Spirits in Bondage (the name was changed on account of A Spirit in Prison (1908) by Robert Hichens) was delayed in publication on account of a shortage of cloth for binding, and did not come out until 20 March 1919, after the appearance of ‘Death in Battle’ in the February number of Reveille – Lewis’s first publication, other than contributions to school magazines. He was in good company in the third number of Reveille, which included poems by Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Hilaire Belloc; his own poem appeared under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’ on which he had finally decided – his own Christian name and his mother’s maiden name.

It received no special attention (‘graceful and polished’, said The Times; ‘the work is strongly imagined and never unhealthy, trifling or affected’, according to the Scotsman), СКАЧАТЬ