C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ I combine the life of an Oxford undergraduate with that of a country householder, a feat which I imagine is seldom performed. Such energies as I have left for general reading go almost entirely on poetry – and little enough of that.⁵⁵

      In fact, as Warnie Lewis subsequently wrote,

What had actually happened was that Jack had set up a joint establishment with Mrs Moore, an arrangement which bound him to her service for the next thirty years and ended only with her death in January 1951. How the arrangement came into being no one will ever know, for it was perhaps the only subject which Jack never mentioned to me; more than never mentioned, for on the only occasion when I hinted at my curiosity he silenced me with an abruptness which was sufficient warning never to re-open the topic.⁵⁶

      There were many drawbacks to this curious state of bondage to which Lewis had voluntarily submitted himself. To begin with, it made him miserably poor at a time when his academic and creative life seemed to demand complete freedom from financial worries. He had an adequate allowance for a bachelor undergraduate living in college or lodgings, but not for a householder with a ‘mother’ and adopted sister largely dependent on him. And he could not, of course, ask his father to increase his allowance as the whole ‘set-up’ with the Moores was kept a secret from him.

While Lewis clearly enjoyed the family life Mrs Moore made possible, even his own diary suggests that she was highly possessive and selfish – or thoughtless – to an astonishing degree. Lewis was expected to help with the housework and run errands for her, even when they were able to employ two resident maids, a daily and a handyman-gardener. ‘I came to live with him after my retirement from the Army in 1932,’ wrote Warnie Lewis, ‘and in the vacation we shared a workroom. I do not think I ever saw Jack at his desk for more than half an hour without Mrs Moore calling for him. “Coming!” Jack would roar, down would go his pen, and he would be away perhaps five minutes, perhaps half an hour; and then return and calmly resume work on a half-finished sentence.’⁵⁷

      Owen Barfield met Lewis in 1919 and after being introduced to Mrs Moore in 1922 he was a frequent visitor to their home. Over the years he and his wife came to know Mrs Moore well, and in a Foreword he wrote for All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927 (1991), he attempted to balance Warnie’s account of her. ‘I find it strange to recall,’ he said,

that during those early years I was given no hint at all of that household background. He was simply a fellow undergraduate and later a literary and philosophical friend. I remember him telling me on one occasion that he had to get back in order to clear out the oven in the gas cooker, and I took it to be something that would happen once in a blue moon. It is only from the Diary that I have learnt what a substantial part of his time and energy was being consumed in helping to run Mrs Moore’s household, and also how much of that was due to the shadow of sheer poverty that remained hanging over them both until at last he obtained his fellowship … One of the things that make me welcome its appearance in print is, that it will do much to rectify the false picture that has been painted of her as a kind of baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress. It is a picture that first appeared as early as 1966 in the introductory Memoir to W.H. Lewis’s Letters of C.S. Lewis, and it has frequently reappeared in the prolific literature on C.S. Lewis which has since been published here and there. If she imposed some burdens on him, she saved him from others by taking them on herself even against his protestations. Moreover she was deeply concerned to further his career.⁵⁸

      The most immediate result of Lewis’s double life when he moved out of college was to prevent him from following up the lead given by even the relative success of Spirits in Bondage and his first tentative steps towards taking his place among the new, young poets of the twenties, or of entering into any kind of literary life outside the ordinary university round. A proposed anthology did not appear, and there were no more letters to Hartmann and Pasley about founding their own poetic movement. With his great mental ability and his developing powers of concentration, Lewis was just able to take a Double First in Literae Humaniores – Mods in March 1920 and Greats in June 1922. He also competed for the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize, the subject set being ‘Optimism’, and won it triumphantly on 24 May 1921.

Another interesting experience about this time was two meetings with W.B. Yeats, then living in Oxford, which he described fully to his brother in a letter of 21 March 1921. Yeats seems to have made a considerable impression on Lewis, who modelled the physical appearance of his magician in Dymer on him:⁵⁹ ‘If he were now alive I would ask his pardon with shame for having repaid his hospitality with such freedom,’ he wrote in the preface to the new edition of 1950. ‘It was not done in malice, and the likeness is not, I think, in itself, uncomplimentary.’⁶⁰ And something of this grander Yeats may have helped to create Merlin in That Hideous Strength.

      The visits to Yeats were among the more interesting highlights of the Oxford side of Lewis’s double existence during the years before he graduated from the Junior to the Senior Common Room. It would be possible to follow him in considerable detail through these years with the aid of copious letters to his brother, regular reports to his father and, from April 1922, a reasonably full diary which he continued, with occasional lapses, until March 1927 – but both letters and diaries are well represented, with long extracts, in the various editions of his letters and All My Road Before Me. The diary, though of great interest from an external point of view, tells little or nothing of Lewis’s spiritual adventures: it was, indeed, almost a public document and was read out loud from time to time to Mrs Moore and her daughter, or handed over to Warnie to peruse when on leave.

      Already in 1921 Lewis had made up his mind that an academic career was what he most hankered after – and if possible an academic career in Oxford. But it seemed an almost impossible ambition. On 18 May 1922, however, ideas for the future were taking more definite shape, and he was writing to his father that one of his tutors, to whom he went for a testimonial,

instead of giving me one advised me very earnestly not to take any job in a hurry; he said that if there was nothing for me in Oxford immediately after Greats, he was sure there would be something later: that College would almost certainly continue my scholarship for another year if I chose to stay up and take another school, and that ‘if I could possibly afford it’ this was the course which he would like me to take.⁶¹

      He mentioned in the same letter that another tutor pointed out that

the actual subjects of my own Greats school are a doubtful quantity at the moment: for no one quite knows what place classics and philosophy will hold in the educational world in a year’s time. On the other hand, the prestige of the Greats school is still enormous: so that what is wanted everywhere is a man who combined the general qualification which Greats is supposed to give, with the special qualifications of any other subjects. And English Literature is a ‘rising’ subject. Thus if I could take a First, or even a Second, in Greats, and a First next year in English Literature, I should be in a very strong position indeed … In such a course I should start knowing more of the subject than some do at the end: it ought to be a very easy proposition compared with Greats.⁶²

Lewis went on to inform his father that he could pretty certainly get a job at once as a schoolmaster, though his inability to play games might count against him – but that ‘the point on which I naturally like to lean is that the pundits at Univ. СКАЧАТЬ