C. S. Lewis: A Biography. Walter Hooper

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СКАЧАТЬ in spite of what they prophesied, discovered cancer,’ wrote Jack to Warnie on 29 September.

They said he might live a few years. I remained at home, visiting him in the Nursing Home for ten days … By this time I had been at home since Aug. 11th, and my work for next term was getting really desperate and, as [the doctor] said I might easily wait for several weeks more and still be in the same position … I crossed to Oxford on Saturday, Sept. 22. On Tuesday 24 I got a wire saying that he was worse, caught the train an hour later, and arrived to find that he had died on Tuesday afternoon.⁶¹

      Jack was confused about the dates when he wrote this. He left Oxford on Tuesday, 24 September. However, when he arrived in Belfast on the evening of Wednesday 25 September, he found that his father had died that afternoon.

      Both Warnie and Jack felt Albert Lewis’s death far more than they had thought possible; and the wrench of leaving Little Lea, their home for most of their lives, whatever their later reactions to it, was also acute. The letters for the next six months are taken up mainly with the business of sorting and selling or keeping the contents of the house, employing a caretaker while the house was put up for sale, and generally winding up the Lewis affairs in Belfast.

In November the letters show Lewis living a normal Oxford life again – sitting up late talking of Norse mythology with Tolkien; learning textual criticism so as to be able to teach it the following term to B.Litt. students; reading Anglo-Saxon poetry with a congenial and promising pupil, Neil Ker.^* ‘Ker shares to the full’, Lewis wrote to Arthur on 5 November, ‘my enthusiasm for the saga world and we had a pleasant evening – with the wind still roaring outside.’⁶² He also attended meetings of the Icelandic Society, the Linguistic Society, the Michaelmas Club, and so on.

As soon as term ended he was off to Ireland, staying with Arthur and setting to work at Little Lea each day. On his return journey to Oxford on 21 December he was reading Bunyan’s Grace Abounding: ‘I should like to know … in general,’ Jack wrote to Arthur on 22 December, ‘what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil-worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more the element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what?’⁶³

He was present at the Christmas Eve celebrations in Magdalen for the first time that year, and found them most impressive. He still did not attend church, even on Christmas Day, but was finding more and more of a religious experience during his long walks in the country – ‘the utter homeliness, the Englishness, the Christendom of it’, he wrote to Arthur on 26 December. It was, he said, so different from a walk they had taken in Co. Antrim a week or so earlier, and yet that too was but ‘another instance of … the “broad-mindedness” of the infinite … Perhaps it is less strange that the Absolute should make both than that we should be able to love both.’⁶⁴

      Looking back in 1935 to his long friendship with Greeves, Lewis summed up their relationship and what he owed to the friend who always remained steadfast to the Christian faith however much he bombarded him with the ‘thin artillery’ of the rationalist:

He remains victor in that debate. It is I who have come round. The thing is symbolical of much in our joint history. He was not a clever boy, he was even a dull boy; I was a scholar. He had no ‘ideas’. I bubbled over with them. It might seem that I had much to give him and that he had nothing to give me. But this is not the truth. I could give concepts, logic, facts, arguments, but he had feelings to offer, feelings which most mysteriously – for he was always very inarticulate – he taught me to share. Hence, in our commerce, I dealt in superficies, but he in solids. I learned charity from him but failed, for all my efforts, to teach him arrogance in return.⁶⁵

      Meanwhile plans for the future were going ahead. Warnie was to join the Lewis – Moore set-up, but a bigger house must be found, and now there might be sufficient money to purchase a definite home of their own, if Little Lea sold well enough.

      Warnie’s service abroad ended in March. He reached England on 16 April 1930 and went straight to London where his brother met him, taking him back to Oxford and then down to Bournemouth where the family holiday was in progress. Later in the month they went over to Belfast to continue sorting out the accumulation of years at Little Lea, selecting what books and furniture to keep, and arranging for the sale of the rest. They had already decided what to do with all the toys that had been the foundation and background to the world of Boxen and its literature, and Jack had written to Warnie on 12 January 1930:

I should not like to make an exception even in favour of Benjamin. After all, these characters (like all others) can, in the long run, live only in ‘the literature of the period’, and I fancy that when we look at the actual toys again (a process from which I anticipate no pleasure at all) we shall find the discrepancy between the symbol … and the character rather acute. No, Brother. The toys in the trunk are quite plainly corpses. We will resolve them into their elements, as nature will do to us.⁶⁶

Like the children at the end of Kenneth Grahame’s Dream Days, ‘we took turn about in digging a hole in the vegetable garden in which to put our toys’, recorded Warnie in his diary on 23 April 1930, ‘and then carried the old attic trunk down and buried them. What struck me most was the scantiness of the material out of which that remarkable imaginary world was constructed. By tacit mutual consent the boxes of characters were buried unopened.’⁶⁷

      Warnie was posted to Bulford on Salisbury Plain in mid-May, but was able to get leave early in June to superintend the final sale of Little Lea, which he left for the last time on 3 June. But little more than a fortnight later their combined house-hunting on the outskirts of Oxford led them to The Kilns, Headington Quarry, which was to be their home for the rest of their lives – and which would become by the end, thirty-three years later, much dearer to Jack who was to know there his greatest happiness and his greatest sorrow near the end of his life.

      On 7 July 1930 Warnie wrote in his diary that on the previous morning

Jack and I went out and saw the place, and I instantly caught the infection. We did not go inside the house, but the eight-acre garden is such stuff as dreams are made on. I never imagined that for us any such garden would ever come within the sphere of discussion. The house (which has two more rooms than Hillsboro) stands at the entrance to its own grounds at the northern foot of Shotover at the end of a narrow lane, which in turn opens off a very bad and little-used road, giving as great privacy as can be reasonably looked for near a large town. To the left of the house are the two brick kilns from which it takes its name – in front, a lawn and hard tennis court – then a large bathing pool, beautifully wooded, and with a delightful circular brick seat overlooking it. After that a steep wilderness broken with ravines and nooks of all kinds runs up to a little cliff topped by a thistly meadow, and then the property ends in a thick belt of fir trees, almost a wood. The view from the cliff over the dim blue distance is simply glorious.⁶⁸

The pool or ‘lake’ in the woods they soon discovered ‘has quite distinguished literary associations, being known locally as “Shelley’s Pool”, and there is a tradition that Shelley used to meditate there’.СКАЧАТЬ