CrystalHurd.com

I am pleased to announce that I have joined the staff of Legendarium! Legendarium is a fantasy/sci-fi site with great articles on all of your obsessions, be they Narnia, Middle-Earth, Star Wars, Doctor Who and more. Plus, the site offers some fantastic work on art, literature, and gaming. My first article is an earlier post from my Lewis and Women series on Narnia.  PLEASE check it out and bookmark the site.  I and some other contributors will be posting weekly, so make sure to stop by often!

Lewis and Women Article on Legendarium is located here:

http://legendarium.mymiddleearth.com/2014/01/18/c-s-lewis-and-women-portrayals-in-the-chronicles-of-narnia

Legendarium link to bookmark:

http://legendarium.mymiddleearth.com

Image courtesy of http://www.rockingwallpaper.com

Last year on December 31st, I wrote a post about spending time with my grandmother at the retirement home. Hospice was called in, and as my parents met with them to discuss treatment options, I fed my dear Granny small dollops of pureed food on the end of a spoon. Delicately, quietly, she ate and I contemplated how life would be when this woman, a candle flickering so proudly throughout my life, would finally pass and her light would be extinguished.

Just a few weeks later, on January 27, she passed peacefully on a Sunday morning. At that same hour years ago, she would have been readying herself for church, curling her golden hair, applying powder to her cheeks, clinging to her Bible with the marked-up passages. But this particular Sunday she lay silent, her vitality tamed by disease and her body conquered by death.

But the story doesn’t end there. Our faith claims that I will see her again without the burden of noisy oxygen machines and frequent morphine injections and the painful experience of blown veins. I will see her triumphant with all of the joy she once knew, but not on this side of eternity.  In the meantime, I realized how life could be when a great light has gone out.  I mourned but then I was motivated. I simply poured my energy into others, exercised the contagious generosity she possessed.  I encouraged my students to live out their dreams of becoming writers. I celebrated authentic friendships. I nurtured and rekindled relationships that are valuable to me. The contemplation catalyzed by her death has enabled me to  ultimately improve my life.  I take better care of myself and in the absence of her light, I feel that I have inspired many other flames to flicker on boldly against the intimidating darkness and uncertainty of our world.

Perhaps this year, you or someone you know lost someone special. I urge you allow yourself time to grieve, remember those times you spent fondly, give yourself permission to cry, but most importantly, honor the individual by spreading goodness to the world he/she left behind. Let the legacy be one of indomitable goodness, forgiveness, and mercy. There is much evil in the world, but also much good.  Understand that you contribute to that balance and make an intentional effort to chase despair out of the dark places.

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I fear that I will disappoint you if I don’t list some of the highlights of the past year.  Many wonderful things happened in 2013, but I will post just six so the list doesn’t get too tedious:

1) In 2013, I became a leadership mentor for the non-profit organization Develop Africa. Develop Africa sponsors scholarships, microfinance loans, and occupational training for residents in Sierra Leone. I met an amazing group of girls through this program. As I watch them learn, grow, and celebrate milestones, it warms my heart. It is an abiding joy to work with these young women. The program has now expanded into Kenya. I look forward to more work with these wonderful ladies and with the fantastic organization.

If you would like to contribute to the stellar work that Develop Africa is doing, please consider making a donation to the organization. I can tell you firsthand that the financial support touches the lives of so many people. It is truly changing lives. To support Develop Africa, please visit http://www.developafrica.org.

2) One of the joys of this year was co-hosting the Narnia podcast with William O’Flaherty and Paul Martin.  I include The Silver Chair two-part series in this as well (which made the “All About Jack” podcast top ten!).  I had a wonderful time rereading the series and discussing it with some of the most respected and admired scholars in the Lewis field. If you haven’t treated yourself to this series, please visit www.narniacast.mymiddleearth.com and download the nine-part series.

3) I continued contributing to Kelly Belmonte’s fantastic blog All Nine Muses –www.allninemuses.wordpress.com. I thoroughly enjoy writing for Kelly (who, by the way, published her excellent first book of poetry Three Ways of Searching available through Finishing Line Press). This year, I became a contributor for Islands of Joy (http://islandsofjoy.blogspot.com), a blog maintained by my friend and fellow Inkling scholar Sorina Higgins.  She is the mastermind behind the fantastic webpage The Oddest Inkling, dedicated to Inkling Charles Williams. Like Kelly, Sorina is also a published poet, with her collections Caduceus and The Significance of Swans.  Both are available on Amazon.

4) I met three wonderful people I really admire this year:

Malcolm Guite

Malcolm taught courses at the C.S. Lewis Foundation Fall Conference (a PURE JOY I experienced last month!). He is an absolutely brilliant, thought-provoking speaker. He signed my copies of his poetry collections – Sounding the Seasons and The Singing Bowl. In addition, I interviewed him for the All About Jack podcast – http://lewisminute.wordpress.com/2013/11/12/aaj-podcast-the-singing-bowl-malcolm-guite/. For more info on this interesting individual, visit the reflection I composed at Islands of Joy – http://islandsofjoy.blogspot.com/2013/11/there-are-few-moments-in-your-life-when.html.

Karen Prior

Dr. Karen Prior is a writer and English professor at Liberty University. I met Karen on Twitter (@LoveLifeLitGod) and thoroughly enjoyed her writing on various websites (Christianity Today, Relevant, Breakpoint, and The Atlantic among others). I purchased her memoir Booked last year (2012), a narrative which explains how books have shaped her physical, emotional, and spiritual development. It is a fascinating, informative, and entertaining read that I HIGHLY recommend.

Photo courtesy of http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com

I finally met her when she conducted a course on writing memoir in Roanoke. Afterwards, we had coffee and enlightening conversation. She is currently working on a biography of Hannah More. She is also a snazzy dresser!

Douglas Gresham

Douglas Gresham is the step-son of C.S. Lewis. In September, I was invited by Lewis scholar Devon Brown to hear Gresham give three different talks at Asbury University. Gresham far exceeded my expectations. He is a warm, friendly gentleman who embodies the tenets of Christianity and demonstrates a lifestyle of generosity and compassion. If you wish to hear more of my day with Gresham, read my reflections on Islands of Joy –  http://islandsofjoy.blogspot.com/2013/10/a-day-with-douglas-gresham.html.

5) Speaking of awesome people, I attended the C.S. Lewis Foundation Fall Conference in November.

My friend and fellow Muse Becka Choat and her bookstore Books by Becka

There I reconnected with old friends and made new ones. I treasure the friendships I make at Lewis-related events. There’s nothing like great conversation with a bunch of Narnians. I also attended a family reunion in August where I reconnected with members of my grandmother’s family. Both weekends were wonderful and nostalgic.

6) Finally, I returned to Europe. I have openly admitted to being an Anglophile (is that unpatriotic?).

This year, we spent four days in London, visited my ancestors’ homestead in Nottinghamshire, and spent two days in Edinburgh, Scotland (and toured the castle!). London is absolutely my favorite place to visit. While there this year, I visited the home of Charles Dickens, the Tower of London, the home of Benjamin Franklin (my husband is directly descended from him), the Sherlock Holmes Museum, and H&M.  😉

I’ve had a blessed year indeed.

There are many wonderful things planned for 2014.  Among them, I, along with Lewis scholar Will Vaus, will be reading through the C.S. Lewis Bible in a year. The plan is simply reading four chapters a day, with reflections and journaling to follow on our respective blogs.  I urge you to join us (even if you don’t have a Lewis Bible!). Will will be blogging at http://willvaus.blogspot.com.

Wishes for a wonderful, healthy, prosperous New Year from me, Aaron, and the puppies!!

Week Seven of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

Joy Davidman (Lewis)

Photo courtesy of en.wikipedia.org

For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was [Joy] not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me…There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.  It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to describe a man’s sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’ But also what poor warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible.  Marriage heals this.  Jointly the two become fully human. ‘In the image of God created He them. Thus, by a paradox, this carnival of sexuality leads us out beyond our sexes.  – 455-456  A Grief Observed

In 1950, a poet from New York added her name to a long roster of Lewis’s female correspondents.  She was a recent convert, a former Communist, who had come to Christ through personal revelations assisted by works of Lewis and his Inkling friend Charles Williams. Helen Joy Davidman (called “Joy”) had travelled a long, laborious, and labyrinthine journey to arrive on the margins of Christianity.  Like Lewis, Joy professed atheism after straying from her Jewish roots.  She, like Lewis, paused and considered the intellectual implications of faith early in her journey.

As Lyle Dorsett writes in his work chronicling Joy’s life, And God Came In, Joy came of age in the heterogeneous turbulence of New York City in the 1920s.  Her mother Jeanette descended from affluent Jewish merchants who had abandoned their home in the Ukraine , migrating like thousands of others to the “promised land” of America.   Jeanette, essentially, was historically Jewish.  However, her husband Joseph Davidman was an atheist who restrained his untraditional views to ensure peace in his household; Dorsett identifies it as a “tepid indifference” to Judaism.  As educators and voracious readers, Joy’s parents fostered an appetite for knowledge into Joy and her younger brother Howard.  During the summer, it was not uncommon for Joy and Howard to visit the library nearly every day, although her parents maintained an impressive library in their home.

However, Joy’s early life was extremely difficult.  Her father was cantankerous and overbearing.  Some family members recall Joseph blowing a whistle to summon his children “in the fashion of trained dogs”.  Joy, forever the doting daughter, attempted to win her father’s affection.  A bright, receptive student, Joy excelled in academics. Although she suffered from a crooked spine, Graves Disease and hyperthyroidism, which contributed to excessive school absences, her grades were largely unaffected. She was soon recognized as a poet with the publication of her poem “Resurrection” (a poem shaped by religious themes, although Joy described it as a “private argument with Jesus”). In addition to a demanding father and nagging illnesses, Joy and her brother Howard endured the “demons of anti-Semitism” which plagued them nearly everywhere they went, even when they travelled throughout the United States on holidays and vacations.

Joy eventually matriculated to Hunter’s College, a tuition-free women’s college located in the Bronx.  Joy thrived there; she quickly found her youthful love of books had matured into an abiding love of literature and language.  Joy was already “proficient” in German and Latin, learned French in college, and taught herself Greek in her spare time.  She also began crucial friendships with other students of the literary persuasion, including novelist Bel Kaufman.  While at Hunter’s, Joy served as associate editor of the literary magazine Echo while participating in the English club and Sigma Tau Delta,the national English studies honorary society.  Joy published a story in Echo titled “Apostate” in which a young Jewish woman elopes with a Christian to avoid an arranged marriage to a “weak man”. The woman is baptized into the Christian faith so she may wed, but the wedding is disrupted by her family who violently beat her as her “husband” looks on and the pastor escapes. The story won the Bernard Cohen Short Story Prize that year. After graduation, she obtained employment as an English teacher at Walton High School.  She also decided to pursue a Master’s degree in English at Columbia University.

Photo courtesy of cslewis.drzeus.net

Her towering academic achievements were unfortunately overshadowed by major cultural shifts.  The Great Depression ravaged the overcrowded, unemployed residents of New York.  Some predicted a slow, yet steady pace of national rehabilitation, but the hopelessness, for some, was too much to bear.  One afternoon before her graduation in 1934, Joy watched in horror as a young woman on an adjoining building plunged to her death. The girl had leapt to her demise after struggling unsuccessfully with depression and hunger. Joy interpreted this as a byproduct of the growing capitalistic society upon which many staked the precarious recovery of the American economy.  Although Joy had never experienced the pangs of hunger and poverty, she felt a deep compassion stirring for those less fortunate: “…her anger grew increasingly at the insanity and callousness of a society that dumped potatoes in the ocean, burned wheat, and poured lime on oranges, while millions of people were unemployed, malnourished, and forced to stand in soup lines and sort through refuse in garbage cans for sustenance” (Dorsett 21). These images, coupled with her increasing animosity toward greedy corporations, eventually led Joy to join the Communist party.

Joy resigned from her teaching position in 1937 to devote more time to writing. Earlier, in 1936, some of Joy’s poems were published in Poetry magazine.  This connection would eventually lead her to a friendship with celebrated novelist and poet Stephen Vincent Benet.  Benet headed the Younger Poet Series for Yale University Press. When Joy submitted nearly fifty poems for the competition, she won a quick admirer in Benet. These works were published by Yale University Press as Letters to a Comrade in 1938. During this time, at the behest of Benet, Joy spent time at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire.  This colony utilized the concept of collaboration and encouragement among writers and artists to produce and refine good art.  It served as an artistic catalyst as well as a retreat from the tumultuous society surrounding them.  Much like the Romantics of the nineteenth century, repose and restoration through nature were viewed as anodynes for the treacherous stranglehold of modern life. Former members of MacDowell include author Willa Cather and poet Sara Teasdale.  If writers and artists were chosen for the colony, they were expected to pay their own expenses, although impoverished ones could still attend with the assistance of philanthropic donations provided by wealthy businessmen and politicians such as Andrew Carnegie, J.P. Morgan and President Grover Cleveland. Ironically, Joy used her time at MacDowell to rail against the evils of capitalism (although she was not a sworn Communist yet) while some of her associates attended only through the sponsorship of corporations!  MacDowell Colony proved to be artistically beneficial for Joy.  She published a novel, Anya, in 1938.

Joy soon became a sworn communist and spent much creative energy contributing to the communist publication New Masses; she also worked a stint in Hollywood writing scripts. Joy eventually met and married fellow writer William Lindsay Gresham.

William (Bill) Lindsay Gresham

Photo courtesy of www.thewaythefutureblogs.com

The couple lived in utter poverty, struggling to make ends meet through their literary endeavors. Joy had two sons, but William’s alcoholism and unfaithfulness were wearing on Joy. With no coping mechanism for the increasing strain on his family and finances, Bill Gresham began to spiral out of control.  One fateful night, Bill called Joy exclaiming that he was having a “nervous breakdown”.  He  “couldn’t stay where he was” but “couldn’t bring himself to come home”.  Then he hung up the phone.  Joy was frantic.  She calmly put her boys to bed, then spent the evening on the phone attempting to locate Bill to no avail. She writes in her essay “The Longest Way Round”:

By nightfall there was nothing left to do but wait and see if he turned up, alive or dead. I put the babies to sleep and waited.  For the first time in my life I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not, after all, “the master of my own fate” and “the captain of my soul”. All my defenses – the walls of arrogance and cocksureness and self-love behind which I hid from God – went down momentarily.  And God came in.  – From Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman (Ed. Don W. King).

Joy writes that she felt “a Person” in the room with her that night. She also admits that, a year or so prior to this occurrence, she had begun reading fantasy works which had led her to C.S. Lewis; Joy specifically cites The Screwtape Letters, Miracles, and The Great Divorce as particularly influential. These works provided Joy not only with entertainment, but with intellectual stimulation in a curious, new direction – the rational argument for faith, a faith she had previously dismissed and eschewed.  That night, overwhelmed by the lack of control over her family life, Joy felt the philosophical foundation shifting beneath her feet.  The fortifications of her atheism were collapsing, and the origin of her wanderlust was being revealed to her. The towering presence of Truth was educating her at this moment.   She could no longer deny that God didn’t exist. After several days, William returned home and found a new woman. Joy renounced atheism and began attending church. She indulged her interests in religious philosophy and Christian dogma, seeing it not as a complicated enigma teeming with restrictions and empty litanies uttered to concrete gods, but as an unnamed pulse of life surging through mankind offering liberation and a renewed appreciation for beauty. She befriended professor Chad Walsh, who maintained a robust correspondence with none other than C.S. Lewis.  Fascinated and grateful to Lewis, Joy began a correspondence with him in 1950.  Joy mentions in “The Longest Way Round”: “I went back to C.S. Lewis and learned from him, slowly, how I had gone wrong. Without his works, I wonder if I and many others might not still be infants “crying in the night'” (95).  The experience influenced her next novel, Weeping Bay.  Although Joy was ecstatic over the spiritual changes occurring within her, it did little to repair her marriage.  William was still drinking and began to dapple in Buddhism while Joy was exploring and practicing orthodox Christianity. In August 1952, she sailed to England “to consult one of the clearest thinkers of our time for help”. She stayed with a friend, Phyllis Williams, while in London and arranged to meet Lewis in Oxford at the Eastgate Hotel.  The visit was a rousing good time.  George Sayer recalls this meeting in his biography Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis:

The party was a decided success. Joy was of medium height, with a good figure, dark hair, and rather sharp features. She was an amusingly abrasive New Yorker, and Jack was delighted by her bluntness and her anti-American views. Everything she saw in England seemed to her far better than what she had left behind. Thus, of the single glass of sherry we had before the meal, she said: ‘I call this civilized. In the States, they give you so much hard stuff that you start the meal drunk and end with a hangover.’ She was anti-urban and talked vividly about the inhumanity of the skyscraper and of the new technology and of life in New York City…She attacked modern American Literature…’Mind you, I wrote that sort of bunk myself when I was young..’ Small farm life was the only good life, she said. Jack spoke up then, saying that, on his father’s wise, he came from farming stock. “I felt that,’ she said. ‘Where else could you get the vitality?’

Joy made quite an impression on the bachelor don.  He invited Joy to dine with him at Magdalen College along with his brother Warnie, who had been absent during the initial meeting at the Eastgate Hotel.  Warnie loved Joy – her quick wit, her boundless sense of humor, her keen intellect.  Joy returned to stay at The Kilns during Christmas. The Lewis men immensely enjoyed Joy’s visit.  Joy and Lewis discuss her upcoming book Smoke on the Mountain. That Christmas, Lewis gave Joy a copy of George MacDonald’s Diary of an Old Soul with an initial inscription from George MacDonald, followed by “Later: from C.S. Lewis to Joy Davidman, Christmas 1952”.**  Joy had a rapturous time at The Kilns, but the tone changed significantly when a letter arrived from Bill. Joy’s cousin Renee was looking after her sons during her voyage and English holiday.  Bill admitted that he had fallen in love with Renee and recommended that he and Joy file for divorce. Distressed and confused, Joy asked Lewis for guidance; Lewis ultimately agreed with Bill and suggested a divorce.

Lewis with David and Douglas Gresham – 1957

Photo courtesy of adventuresofabeautyqueen.com

In late November, Joy moved, with her sons in tow, to England.  Her marriage was dissolving but Joy was happy to be “a transplant”. She struggled to provide for her family, as Bill’s child support checks were insufficient and often unpredictable. She maintained her friendship with Lewis, even later obtaining a residence in Headington, near The Kilns. Lewis would visit “every day”  with many visits lasting “until eleven at night”.  Although many maintain that Joy “forced herself” on Lewis because she needed financial assistance, these visits were prompted by Lewis, not by Joy. In the summer of 1955, Chad and Eva Walsh visited Lewis and Joy and “smelled marriage in the air”. However, Lewis endorsed the Church of England edict which claims that marriages are holy unions and cannot be dissolved, and thus remarriage was impossible.

Nonetheless, Lewis eventually fell in love with Joy.  Some of his friends disapproved of the union, partially because of the Church’s views concerning divorce and partly because Joy was known to have an explosive temper. George Sayer recalls one afternoon during which he had business in town and left his wife Moira to read at The Kilns until he was finished. Lewis excused himself to take a nap and when Joy returned with Lewis’s laundry to find a woman at The Kilns, she was infuriated: “Who the hell are you and what the bloody hell are you doing in this house?”  Moira had previously met Joy and attempted to unsuccessfully jog Joy’s memory, ‘We have met before and I have been invited here by Mr. Lewis”.  Livid, Joy stamped out.

Photo courtesy of thoughtsonbookss.blogspot.com

Despite her temper, it was obvious that Joy was passionately in love and that Lewis was developing mutual feelings for Joy.  Although I am not at liberty to discuss them, I read all of Joy’s now famous and controversial love sonnets while conducting research at the Wade Center in Wheaton, Illinois last month.  These sonnets were most likely written in 1953, during her initial visit to England.  If you would like more information on these sonnets, please read Don W. King’s recent article “A Naked Tree: Joy Davidman’s Love Sonnets to C.S. Lewis” in the latest edition of SEVEN, published by the Marion E. Wade Center. In this article, King summarizes the sonnets and provides excellent literary analysis on their origin and meaning.  Comically, Lewis at first puts Joy off by claiming that he prefers blondes. Perhaps it was the humor of an old bachelor, but Joy is deeply affected by this dismissal. The theme emerges in several of the sonnets.

As many now know, thanks to the romantic yet hyperbolic film Shadowlands, Joy’s residential permit was not renewed by the British Home Office.  To extend his British citizenship, Lewis generously married Joy in a civil ceremony on 23 April 1956.  Lewis kept the affair quiet, fearing criticism and disapproval from his colleagues and friends. Joy was then diagnosed with cancer (originating from radium treatments for her thyroid condition when she was young).  She began evasive cancer treatments.  The illness proved to be a turning point for Lewis; he realized that he truly did love Joy.  Furthermore, he wanted to seal a commitment before God.  In the spring of 1957, Lewis’s friend, the Reverend Peter W. Bide, arrived at the hospital to pray for Joy’s recovery. Bide eventually agreed to marry the couple, and did so on 21 March 1957.  After this, Joy experienced a period of brief but wonderful convalescence. They honeymooned in Wales and Ireland.  Later they spent twelve glorious days in Greece with the Greens (Roger and June).

But unfortunately the shadow of cancer returned. Joy was in a wheelchair, but still gregarious and lively, playing Scrabble and chatting frequently with Lewis. Despite all of the optimism, all knew, including Joy herself, that the time was at hand.

Photo courtesy of www.awesomestories.com

Joy passed away on 13 July 1960. Although their marriage had been brief, it was an experience which made Lewis incandescently happy. The loss shook him to his very core.  His reflections on Joy’s death were later published as A Grief Observed.

The Controversy of Joy

In many academic circles, Joy is portrayed as a sassy, impertinent shrew who exploited a kind, overly generous bachelor for citizenship, tuition for her children, a home, and eventually two marriages. Many prominent scholars have chosen to diminish, if not altogether ignore, Joy’s contribution to Lewis’s bibliography (Til We Have Faces is dedicated to her – Lewis believed it was his best work) as well as her personal/emotional impact on Lewis. It is perplexing that so many scholars dismiss Joy’s influence because they felt she intruded on Lewis’s good nature.  The love sonnets reveal that she was passionately in love with Lewis.  Initially, it was an intellectual attraction which matured into a sexual one.  They shared many aspects of their interests and their faith, including a similar conversion experience (Joy and Lewis admit to being “on their knees” in search of God), the mutual love of language, a thirst for knowledge and truth, and the strong desire to serve God with their literary talents.

Joy thoroughly loved Lewis as Lewis thoroughly loved Joy.  She truly made him happy.  One cannot simply erase her from Lewis’s narrative simply because she seemed abrasive. Many of Lewis’s friends did not agree with his marriage, but in the end, Lewis enjoyed a wonderful love affair with his wife, who provided creative collaboration, served as an artistic influence, and showed him a love which surpassed his already vivid imagination. A Grief Observed was not written for Lewis’s mother or Mrs. Moore – it was an outstanding record of Lewis’s deep, undying love for his wife, whom he refers to throughout as his “lover”.  The love sonnets reveal that Joy fostered this same love for Lewis much earlier, but the feelings expressed were no less substantial.

Consider these passages from A Grief Observed:

The most precious gift that marriage gave me was this constant impact of something very close and intimate yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant – in a word, real. Is all that work to be undone? Is what I shall still call [Joy] to sink back horribly into being not much more than one of my old bachelor pipedreams? Oh my dear, my dear, come back for one moment and drive that miserable phantom away. Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed  to crawl back – to be sucked back – into it? (447)

You tell me, ‘she goes on.’ But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. (449).

This, to me, is resonant of Song of Solomon, chapter three:

On my bed by night

I sought him whom my soul loves;

I sought him, but found him not.

I will rise now and go about the city,

in the streets and in the squares;

I will seek him whom my soul loves.

I sought him, but found him not.

The watchmen found me

as they went about in the city.

“Have you seen him whom my soul loves?”

In the Biblical account of the bride’s dream, she eventually discovers “the one whom her soul loves”.  But Lewis realizes that he will not, in this life, encounter Joy again.

Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet [Joy] again only if I learn to love you so much that I don’t care whether I meet her or not? Consider, Lord, how it looks to us. What would anyone think of me if I said to the boys, ‘No toffee now. But when you’ve grown up and don’t really want toffee you shall have as much of it as you choose? If I knew that to be eternally divided from [Joy] and eternally forgotten by her would add greater joy and splendor to her being, of course I’d say, ‘Fire Ahead.’ Just as if, on earth, I could have cured her cancer by never seeing her again.  I’d have had to. (460)

In the conclusion, Lewis writes,

How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, ‘I am at peace with God.’ She smiled, but not at me. Poi is torno all’ eternal fonta [Then unto the eternal fountain she turned].

For Joy’s epithet, Lewis wrote,

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,

And field, and forest, as they were

Reflected in a single mind)

Like cast off clothes was left behind

In ashes, yet with hopes that she,

Re-born from holy poverty,

In lenten lands, hereafter may

Resume them on her Easter Day

Lewis describes her as “the whole world…Reflected in a single mind”.  What beautiful and poignant words devoted to a fascinating woman. Yes, Joy Lewis was flawed, as we all are.  But to tarnish her legacy with misconception and doubts, to excuse her contributions as manufactured chivalry extended by a benevolent bachelor to a lonely and divorced mother, to characterize her as a “gold digger”, is simply inaccurate.  As researchers, we exhaustively explore to uncover the truth.  After reading the love sonnets, my humble impression is that Joy Davidman adored C.S. Lewis. She loved him as deeply and as wholeheartedly as a woman can love a man, no matter how coy and resistant he was. As illustrated in the opening quote, Lewis reciprocated these passionate feelings. She was his helpmate, his lover, his wife.  And the evidence strongly suggests that she was proud and grateful to be called “Mrs. Lewis”.

Joy, I argue, will also help Lewis shape and more sharply define his female characters. She radically alters his feminine preconceptions and ultimately his portrayals of women. Next week, we will begin our literary analysis of these characters with his first fictional work A Pilgrim’s Regress.  Join me!

**I actually held this exact copy on my visit to the Wade Center last month, where many Lewis possessions are currently stored.  Some furniture, such as Lewis’s desk and wardrobe, are on display for visitors, scholars, and enthusiasts  – http://www.wheaton.edu/wadecenter.

Week Six of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

Ruth Pitter

Photo Courtesy of www.poetryarchive.org

An interesting subject, Jack’s views on women. His perceptions were very numinous here as elsewhere. I have thought that losing his mother (cruel loss at age 8, and horribly emphasized by circumstances) must have seemed a black betrayal.  If he was mistrustful of women, it was not hatred, but a burnt child’s dread of fire. There was something else later on, I believe, in early manhood – some further ghastly let-down.  There is such a thing as being ill-fated in one respect or another. It is a pity that he made his first (and perhaps biggest) impact with Screwtape, in which some women are only too well portrayed in their horrors, rather like Milton’s Satan – it is this perhaps that has made people think he hated us? But even here, the insight is prodigious: and in the strength of the 3 romances, and the children’s books, I would say he was a great and very perspicacious lover of women, from poor little things right up to the “Lady” in Perelandra. I think he touched innumerable women to the heart here – I know he did me – one could sort of “home on” his love & understanding like an aircraft on a beam. As for Screwtape, I have wondered whether his experience with the “mother” he adopted [Mrs. Janie Moore] did not find a steam-vent here. The pressure once let off, and the success of the book being so great, the steam could be put to work less violently. Surely the shoals of letters he got from women (as he told me) must show how great was his appeal to them: nobody’s going to tell me these were hate-letters.  – Ruth Pitter in a letter to Walter Hooper, 13 January 1969

This week, the introduction for Ruth Pitter is written by the erudite and insightful Don W. King.  King has authored several books on Lewis, including C.S. Lewis, Poet, which I believe was a significant work in assisting Lewis’s induction into the Poet’s Corner this fall, as well as editing the letters of Joy Davidman  (Out of My Bone).  He has authored the only critical biography on poet Ruth Pitter (Hunting the Unicorn) who served as a mentor for Lewis’s poetry.  Most recently, several of King’s collected writings have been published by Abilene Christian University Press as Plain to the Inward Eye. At the end of this post, I will provide links to purchase King’s books – an excellent investment!  His research has single-handedly shaped my perception of Lewis’s relationships with women, as he has completed major research studies on two major females in Lewis’s life.  His voice is unbiased, unaffected by passions and circumstance, illustrating clarity in his depiction of Lewis and his female companions.  He, along with Hal Poe, created the Inklings Fellowship, which hosts regional meetings at Montreat College and conferences in Oxford — http://www.uu.edu/societies/inklings/.

Although Ruth Pitter (1897-1992) is not well known, her credentials as a poet are extensive, and in England from the mid 1930’s to the mid 1970’s she maintained a modest yet loyal readership. In total she produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse. Her A Trophy of Arms (1936) won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937, and in 1954 she was awarded the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, she became the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955. Furthermore, from 1946 to 1972 she was often a guest on BBC radio and television programs, In 1974 The Royal Society of Literature elected her to its highest honor, a Companion of Literature, and in 1979 she received her last national award when she was appointed a Commander of the British Empire.

Critical evaluations of her poetry have always been favorable. In the “Preface” to Pitter’s First and Second Poems, Hilaire Belloc praises her poetry as “an exceptional reappearance of the classical spirit amongst us.” He likens her verse to a strong stone building and argues really good verse “contrasted with the general run of that in the midst of which it appears, seems to me to have a certain quality of hardness; so that, in the long run, it will be discovered, as a gem is discovered in mud.” In her poetry he finds “beauty and right order.” Belloc also writes in the “Preface” to her A Mad Lady’s Garland that Pitter has two peculiar poetic gifts: “A perfect ear and exact epithet. How those two ever get combined is incomprehensible—one would think it was never possible—but when the combination does appear then you have verse of that classic sort which is founded and secure of its own future.” Rudolph Gilbert calls Pitter “the poet of purity” and notes “what the poetry reader values most in Pitter’s poems is her eloquence . . . In Pitter one almost looks through the language, as through air, discerning the exact form of the objects which stand there, and every part and shade of meaning is brought out by the sunny light resting upon them.” Later he adds: “She has a first-rate intuitive gift of observation, a control of poetic language and magical perception that is always to found in great poetry.” C. S. Lewis, who carried on an extensive correspondence with Pitter about poetry, often lavished praise on her verse. For example, he writes: “Trophy of Arms [1936] is enough for one letter for it has most deeply delighted me. I was prepared for the more definitely mystical poems, but not for this cool, classical quality. You do it time after time—create a silence and vacancy and awe all round the poem. If the Lady in Comus had written poetry one imagines it wd. have been rather like this” (July 19, 1946).

Pitter was also a voluminous letter writer. Her friends and correspondents read like a “Who’s Who” of twentieth-century British literary luminaries, including AE (George Russell), A. R. Orage, Hiliare Belloc, Walter de la Mare, Julian Huxley, John Masefield, Phillip and Ottoline Morrell, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, James Stephens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Sackville-West, Dorothy Wellesley, Lord David Cecil, John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, John Wain, Kathleen Raine, and May Sarton. Stylistically Pitter’s letters are marked by crisp prose, precise imagery, and elegant simplicity reflecting a well-read and vigorous mind—lithe, curious, penetrating, analytical, and perceptive. Readers would do well to spend time with the poetry and letters of this remarkable woman.

Don W. King

Professor of English

Editor, Christian Scholar’s Review

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Photo courtesy of www.montreat.edu

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Ruth Pitter in my post on Lewis’s female correspondents. In that post, I mentioned that George Sayer recalls a conversation he had with Lewis after picking him up from Pitter’s home.  Lewis stated that, “…if he were not a confirmed bachelor, Ruth Pitter would be the woman he would like to marry”.  Sayer remarks that it was not too late, to which Lewis replies, “Oh yes it is…I’ve burnt my boats” (Sayer).

As King points out in Hunting the Unicorn, Lewis and Pitter met through a mutual acquaintance, David Cecil. In a letter to Lewis following their first meeting, she is beaming with respect and admiration: “My visit to you has discountenanced all the gypsy’s warnings of people who say ‘never meet you favorite authors. they are so disappointing’ 17 July 1946

However, both were already mutual admirers of the other’s work.  Lewis, always the aspiring poet, found a mentor in Ruth Pitter.  Pitter, in the same vein, found a spiritual mentor in Lewis. Pitter admits that Lewis was a significant influence on her eventual conversion to Christianity.  Her early poems illustrate the darkness and confusion associated with spiritual ambivalence.  However, as World War II progressed, Pitter reassessed the source of her unending despair.  She found hope by simply turning on the radio and listening to Lewis’s wartime broadcasts which would later become Mere Christianity:

There were air raids at night. The factory was dark and dirty. And I remember thinking – well – I must find somebody or something because like this I cannot go on. I stopped in the middle of Battersea Bridge one dreadful March night when it was cold, and the wind was howling over the bridge, and it was a s dark as the pit, and I stood and leaned against the parapet and thought – like this I cannot go on. And it didn’t come to me at once but some time afterwards I heard the broadcast talks of C.S. Lewis, and I at once grappled them to my soul, as Shakespeare says.  And I used to assemble the family to hear because I thought that they were so good that even from the point of view of enjoyment people shouldn’t miss them, and I got every word of his that I could, and I could see by hard argument there was only the one way for it. I had to be intellectually satisfied as well as emotionally because at that time of life one doesn’t just fall into it in adolescent emotion, and I was satisfied at every point that it was the one way and the hard way to do things. (Hunting the Unicorn 118)

The poems from this period  were published as The Bridge: Poems 1939-1944. The inspiration stems partly from the bridge Pitter travelled over on her commute from Chelsea to Battersea.  Also, King illuminates, the bridge represents the movement of her thoughts between the ideal and the real.

Photo courtesy of www.todayinliterature.com

 This continual search, a wanderlust to fulfill an unnamed desire, is what drove Pitter to continually find hope in the utter hopelessness of war and death and rationing and factory work. Lewis had helped her uncover the origin of her restlessness; for this, Pitter was grateful. She went on to become a dedicated Anglican parishioner. Lewis often sent Pitter verses and asked for complete honesty in her assessment. He feared that her adoration of his works would encourage a cautious modesty, that her admiration would prevent her from giving an accurate critique.  However, Pitter provided excellent feedback.  In her journal, Pitter reflects on Lewis’s verse (September 29):

“The peaks of poetry are shiftingly veiled, and different readers catch different glimpses of the transcendental”. I would like to know more about the actual process of conception in his case. Did his great learning, & really staggering skill in verse inhibit the poetry? Did he ever (like most of us) catch some floating bit of emotional thistledown & go on from that, or did he plan on a subject like an architect? (Producing perhaps short epics?) He had a great stock of the makings of a strong poet: strong visual memory, strong recollections of childhood: desperately strong yearnings for lost Paradise & Hoped Heaven (“sweet desire”): not least a strong primitive intuition of the diabolical (not merely the horrific). In fact, his whole life was oriented & motivated by an almost-uniquely persisting child’s sense of glory and of nightmare.  The adult events were received into a medium still as pliable as wax, wide open to the glory, and equally vulnerable, with a man’s strength to feel it all, and a great scholar’s & writer’s stills to express and to interpret.  It is almost as though the adult disciplines, notably the technique of his verse, had largely inhibited his poetry, which is perhaps, after all, most evident in his prose. I think he wanted to be a poet more than anything. Time will show. But if it was magic he was after, he achieved this sufficiently elsewhere.

After seven years of corresponding, Lewis and Pitter agreed to use “Christian names” when addressing one another in letters. This undoubtedly proves the increased intimacy between Lewis and Pitter.  They would sometimes eat lunch together and maintained a healthy correspondence for some time.  Although Pitter never married, there is a strong possibility that she had romantic feelings for Lewis. Her nephew, Mark Pitter, admits that his aunt harbored strong feelings for Lewis, but was also steadfastly traditional in her beliefs surrounding relationships. For example, Pitter would have never suggested the possibility of a relationship to Lewis: women should never be sexually aggressive, becoming “the hunter”. Such behavior was unladylike and illustrated, for some, the desperation of a woman vying for attention and companionship.

This is why a relationship between Lewis and Pitter never graduated past a fond friendship. Ruth was far too romantically reserved to pursue Lewis.  On the other hand, another poetess, a brassy, former communist named Joy Davidman, was also stirred by Lewis’s words.  She, in contrast to Pitter, knew exactly what she wanted and went after it.  She began a correspondence which would climax into TWO marriages with Lewis.  Lewis was a rather coy lover, enjoying intellectual intimacy with women, but always resisting any emotional investment. However, Joy was able to melt the “great glacier” around Lewis’s heart. Did Joy’s entrance stifle Pitter and Lewis’s friendship?  To an extent, yes. Lewis wished that the two would become fast friends, but her outspoken aggressiveness proved intolerable for many of Lewis’s friends. Pitter admits to writing to Joy, with no reply.  Perhaps Joy felt threatened.  Pitter had dined with Davidman and Lewis, but the correspondence slows during this period, as Lewis takes care of his ailing wife.

Could Pitter and Lewis have become lovers? One cannot rule it out.  However, Pitter’s cool avoidance of romance eliminated any chance of a relationship. Joy pursued Lewis with everything she had, Pitter would not.  Pitter’s next volume of poetry was titled Still By Choice.  How ironic are these words when considering her reluctance to engage Lewis for a deeper relationship.  While Joy blindly forged ahead, Pitter was still.   Still by her own admonition.

Ruth enjoyed a successful career as a poet, even though she often obtained other employment for financial stability.  She won many awards, including the Gold Medal for Poetry, a recognition she accepted from the Queen herself (since Ruth was the first female to be honored with the award, the Queen insisted that she present it personally).   Ruth also did several broadcasts on the BBC and appeared on a show called Brain Trust.  She died in 1992, leaving behind a wealth of poetry, a rich and extravagant legacy of language.

In my next installment , we will investigate a very controversial, yet significant woman in Lewis’s life.  She was his wife (twice!); her death was the impetus for the masterpiece A Grief Observed.

Next week we explore the enigma that is Joy Davidman (Lewis).

For more information on Pitter’s relationship with other writers, including a VERY intriguing entanglement with George Orwell, check out Don W. King’s Hunting the Unicorn: http://www.amazon.com/Hunting-Unicorn-Critical-Biography-Pitter/dp/0873389476/ref=sr_1_30?ie=UTF8&qid=1374026635&sr=8-30&keywords=don+w+king

Also don’t forget to pick up some of Don’s other great works: C.S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse  http://www.amazon.com/C-S-Lewis-Poet-Legacy-Impulse/dp/0873386817/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374026842&sr=1-1&keywords=cs+lewis+poet

Plain to the Inward Eye: http://www.amazon.com/Plain-Inward-Eye-Selected-Essays/dp/0891123903/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1374026813&sr=8-1&keywords=plain+to+the+inward+eye

Out of My Bone: The Letters of Joy Davidman http://www.amazon.com/Out-My-Bone-Letters-Davidman/dp/080286399X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1374026870&sr=1-1&keywords=out+of+my+bone

Week Five of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

Elizabeth Anscombe

Photo Courtesy of www.theologyethics.com

The lady is quite right to refute what she things bad theistic arguments, but does this not almost oblige her as a Christian to find good ones in their place: having obliterated me as an Apologist ought she not to succeed me?  – letter to Stella Aldwinckle 12 June 1950

In his preface to the first Socratic Digest, C.S. Lewis explains that the genesis of the Oxford Socratic Club began with an inquiry by a female chaplain, Stella Aldwinckle.  Aldwinckle asked Lewis if they could establish club where both sides of the debate over God’s existence (as well as facets of faith) could meet, discuss, and be welcomed. Lewis, intrigued by the idea, continues:

It is a little remarkable that, to the best of my knowledge, no society had ever before been formed for such a purpose.  There had been plenty of organizations that were explicitly Christian – the S.C.M. [Student Christian Movement], the Ark [Oxford Christian Society], the O.U.C.H. [Oxford University Church Union], the O.I.C.C.U. [Oxford Intercollegiate  Christian Union]- and there had been plenty of others, scientific and political, which were, if not explicitly, yet profoundly anti-Christian in outlook.  The questions about Christianity arose, no doubt, often enough in private conversation, and cast its shadow over the aesthetic or philosophical debates in many societies: but an arena specially devoted to the conflict between Christian and unbeliever was a novelty.  It’s value from a merely cultural point of view is very great. In any fairly large and talkative community such as a university there is always the danger that those who think alike should gravitate together into coteries where they will henceforth encounter opposition only in the emasculated form of rumour that the outsiders say thus and thus.  The absent are easily refuted, complacent dogmatism thrives, and difference of opinion are embittered by group hostility.  Each group hears not the best, but the worst, that the other group can say.  In the Socratic all this was changed. Here a man could get the case for Christianity without all the paraphernalia of pietism and the case against it without the irrelevant sansculottisme of our common anti-God weeklies.  At the very least we helped to civilize one another; sometimes we ventured to hope that if our Athenian patron were allowed to be present, unseen, at our meetings he might not have found the atmosphere wholly alien  (386-387)

And so began the Oxford Socratic Club.  Lewis was enthusiastic about the idea, and served as president until he accepted a post at Cambridge University in 1954.  The club provided an opportunity to discuss intellectual concepts of belief and unbelief without all the “hostility” that usually ensues from differences in opinion.  Here, students presented papers which provided insight into various facets of spirituality.  Lewis was taking quite a gamble; this club could easily have stirred passions to the point where students were no longer receptive, thus increasing strife and encouraging a culture of misunderstanding. However, under Lewis’s direction, the club thrived.

One important aspect to note is that the club started after an inquiry from a female chaplain.  Adlwinckle was the Pastorate’s chaplain for women students, and noticed that scientific arguments were affecting modern belief. She had previously hosted a series of discussions “for agnostics and atheists at Somerville College” and wished to “establish such a forum across the university as a whole” (McGrath). Equally as important is a composition of the club.  McGrath remarks that its members were primarily women.  In 1944, records indicated 164 members, 109 of which were students hailing from Oxford’s five all-women colleges.

In 1947, Lewis published Miracles: A Preliminary Study.  During this term, it was expected the Lewis would bring facets of his argument up for debate at Socratic meetings. One of Lewis’s points was that naturalism is self-refuting. This argument is located in the third chapter of Miracles, originally titled “The Self-Contradiction of the Naturalist”.   On 2 February 1948, a young scholar named Elizabeth Anscombe presented an argument titled “A Reply to Mr. C.S. Lewis’s Argument that ‘Naturalism’ is Self-Refuting”.

In this keen, insightful paper, Anscombe basically dismantled Lewis’s argument. Lewis has stated previously, “If thought is the undesigned and irrelevant product of cerebral motions, what reason have we to trust it?”   If our beliefs are products of “environmental factors or evolutionary pressures”, and we cannot trust it when navigating our complex beliefs, then it is also untrustworthy when it attempts to build a case against the existence of God.  Materialist and “naturalist” J.B.S. Haldane wrote:

If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true.  They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have to reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.  In order to escape from this necessity of sawing away the branch on which I am sitting, so to speak, I am compelled to believe that mind is not wholly conditioned by matter (“When I am Dead”).

Lewis illuminated that if naturalism results from “rational reflection, then the validity of that process of thought has to be assumed in order to reach this conclusion” (McGrath). Essentially, Lewis states that “No thought is valid if it can be fully explained as the result of irrational causes”.  In this way, it negates itself, or is “self-refuting”.  Anscombe, on the other hand, believed that “irrational causes” that supposedly spurn human thoughts could be debated.  In her paper, she claims,

What sorts of thing would one normally call “irrational causes” for human thoughts? – If one is asked this, one immediately thinks of such things as passion, self-interest, wishing only to see the agreeable or disagreeable, obstinate and prejudicial adherence to the views of a party or school with which one is connected, and so on.  Suppose one mentions such things, and then someone says: There are also tumors on the brain, tuberculosis, jaundice, arthritis, and similar things, one would rightly object that these do not belong in the same list as the others. They are not “irrational causes”; they are conditions which we know to go with irrational beliefs or attitudes with sufficient regularity for us to call them causes.

You speak of “irrational causes,” and by that you seem to mean “any cause that is not something rational.” “Something rational” you explain by example: “such as (you say) argument from observed facts.” You contrast the following sentences: (1) “He things that dog dangerous because he has often seen it muzzled and he has noticed that messengers always try to avoid going to that house”; (2) “He thinks that dog dangerous because it is black and ever since he was bitten by a black dog in childhood he has always been afraid of black dogs.” “Both sentences” you say “explain why the man thinks as he does. But the one explanation substantiates the value of his thought and the other discredits it…The difference is that in the first instance the man’s belief is cause by something rational (by argument from observed facts) while in the other it is caused by something irrational (association of ideas).” – Socratic Digest 2012, edited by Joel Heck

Furthermore, Anscombe is also critical of his conclusions based upon faulty reasoning.  In the club notes, she addressed Lewis on his misuse of “cause” and “ground”.  She also accused Lewis of “misunderstanding her” because he did not “distinguish between ‘having reasons’ and ‘having reasoned’ in the causal sense”.  The notes indicate that the group was conflicted: some members sided with Anscombe while others sided with Lewis or at least requested that he clear up ambiguities associated with terms used in his initial argument (Miracles). Lewis notes later that disagreed with the use of the word “valid” and makes several more assertions about his position.

Over the years, many biographers have argued that Lewis was spiritually deflated by this episode.  Alister McGrath points to several authors, A.N. Wilson among them, who have suggested that this “loss” deeply affected Lewis, to the point where he questioned his value as an apologist.  He altered chapter three of Miracles after the debate, retitling it “The Cardinal Difficulty of Naturalism”.  The quote from his letter to Aldwinckle, included above, illustrates that he felt defeated, but it does not suggest that Lewis “gave up”. Supposedly, Lewis “abandoned” theological argument and began writing children’s stories and devotional works. In her introduction to Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Anscombe recalls that Dr. Havard had her over for dinner and invited Lewis to perhaps mend fences:

The meeting of the Socratic Club at which I read my paper has been described by several of his friends as a horrible and shocking experience which upset him very much. Neither Dr. Havard (who had Lewis and me to dinner a few weeks later) nor Professor Jack Bennet remembered any such feelings on Lewis’s part…My own recollection is that it was an occasion of sober discussion of certain quite definite criticisms, which Lewis’s rethinking and rewriting showed he thought was accurate. I am inclined to construe the odd accounts of the matter by some of his friends—who seem not to have been interested in the actual arguments or the subject-matter—as an interesting example of the phenomenon called projection.

What need was there for resentment?  Anscombe obviously respected Lewis and perceived her argument more as an intellectual exercise; it was never an attempt to “one up” a famous professor. She, like Lewis, hailed from Ireland.  She was a devout Catholic, after converting during her first year of studies at Oxford.  She was a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, a mother of seven children, and author of several celebrated philosophical works including Intention.

Here we see that Lewis is most democratic with the female members of the Socratic Club.  They had equal opportunities to explore (and even dispute, as we see here) various aspects of club topics. Lewis created the club with that very intention in mind, to expand and challenge the minds of others, including himself.  I do not see any evidence that Lewis resented Anscombe.  In fact, according to the quote from his 12 June letter to Aldwinckle, he strongly recommends Anscombe to replace him as Socratic Club president.  Would Lewis have wanted this if he were upset over loosing the debate to Anscombe?  I believe not.  Although we do detect a change in the direction of Lewis’s writing at that time, and would be foolish to completely dismiss Anscombe’s debate as making a significant impression on Lewis, it is not a “defeat”, just simply a new lens which perhaps prompted a new trajectory for Lewis’s writing. The suggestion that Anscombe was the inspiration for the White Witch in preposterous.  Lewis would not stoop to characterizing in such a negative light.

Next weekend, we will explore further an admirer of Lewis’s, poetess Ruth Pitter.

If you desire more information on the Socratic Club, please check out the 2012 version of the Socratic Digest, edited by Joel Heck.

Week Four of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

 Ladies and the Letters: Lewis and His Female Correspondents

Sister Penelope

Photo Courtesy of booksbycslewis.blogspot.com

I’ve just got back from Ireland & found your 2 letters among the mountain of mail.  I’ve written to Genia [Goelz].  No time for a proper letter to you – I’ve had 9 hours’ letter-writing already! 

– C.S. Lewis to Mary Van Deusen 12 September 1952

After C.S. Lewis recorded some short broadcasts for the BBC, a collection that would later be titled Mere Christianity, he would find himself quite an unlikely celebrity.  This new-found fame earned Lewis some attention (to which he was naturally reluctant) and exponentially increased his “fan mail”. It was not uncommon for Lewis to rise two hours earlier than the rest of his household in order to answer his correspondents. In fact, his home The Kilns still has an outside staircase, which Lewis had installed so that he could come and go in the early morning without disturbing others. His correspondence would only multiply with the publication of The Chronicles of Narnia.

C.S. Lewis was nothing if not a diligent, attentive correspondent.  Unlike many prominent authors, Lewis attempted to answer every single letter he received.  The content of these letters ranged from answering basic questions about his fictional works (“What happened to Susan?”) to deep, theological inquiries into Lewis’s perspective. Lewis almost always referred to a correspondent’s previous letter, stating that he was praying for their illness or family situation. This week, we will get a brief glimpse into the correspondence he maintained with several females.

It is significant, I believe, to call these individuals to mind when discussing Lewis’s relationship with women.  If Lewis were misogynistic, as some assert, then he would not have invested an enormous amount of time responding to their letters and replying to their concerns and questions.  His letters to women often reflect a side of Lewis we don’t always detect in his academic writings or even in his fictional works.

Sister Penelope

Sister Penelope CSMV (1890-1977) was the daughter of a clergyman, born 20 March 1890. She was sent in September 1908 to Worchester High School, which was renamed Alice Ottley School in 1914 after its first headmistress. The school was founded by a famous Tractarian Reverend William John Butler.  Sister Penelope enjoyed her time at Alice Ottley, as well as the tutelage under the woman who inspired its namesake. Under Ms. Ottley’s guidance, Sister Penelope “developed a devotion to the blessed Virgin Mary and a love of Greek and Latin” (Walter Hooper in Biographical Appendix, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3).  In 1912, she joined the Convent of the Community of St Mary the Virgin at Watage (thus the CSMV). She was later sent to Oxford to study theology under Dr. Kidd, the Warden of Keble College. She wrote several books concerning religious life, including a spiritual autobiography titled Meditation of a Caterpillar, as well as other works such as The Wood for the Trees, God Persists: A Short Survey of World History in the Light of Christian Faith, They Shall be My People, and Hugh of St. Victor: Selected Spiritual Writings. In addition, she penned hundreds of book reviews.

Sister Penelope had recently finished God Persists when she was introduced to Out of the Silent Planet.  She writes to Lewis on 5 August 1939:

It provokes thought in just the directions where I have always wanted to think; and wherever it is most delightfully suggestive one senses the most profound scriptural basis…There are bits – Augray’s views about the different sorts of bodies, the relations of the unfallen creatures with Oyarsa, their social order, their peaceful awareness of the spiritual world – which are more lovely and more satisfying than anything I have met before

Lewis and Sister Penelope maintained a lifelong correspondence and finally met when Lewis spoke to the junior sisters of the Community of St. Mary the Virgin in 1942.  One will notice that Lewis dedicates his next installment in the Ransom or Space Trilogy “To some Ladies at Wantage”. Sister Penelope was known for her wit and humor.  Her complete works, Hooper laments, have never been collected and published.

Mary Shelley/ Neyland

Mary Neyland was a student of Lewis’s who maintained a robust correspondence with him over the years. She appreciated his guidance as a tutor, but later depended upon him as a spiritual mentor.  My friend and fellow Lewis scholar Brenton Dickieson has written a concise, erudite exposition on the relationship between Lewis and Neyland on his blog A Pilgrim in Narnia.  For more information on Neyland and Lewis, I urge you to read “Letters to an Oxonian Lady: C.S. Lewis’ Relationship with Mary Neyland” – http://apilgriminnarnia.com/2012/06/14/letters-to-an-oxonian-lady-c-s-lewis-relationship-with-mary-neylan/

Ruth Pitter

In a few weeks, we will be discussing Ruth Pitter in greater depth as we explore Hunting the Unicorn and Lewis’s relationship with Ruth. For now, I will provide a brief biography. Ruth Pitter (1898-1992) was the eldest of three children born to schoolteachers. At a young age, Ruth was bribed by her parents to memorize poetry, perhaps a penny or a sixpence depending upon the poem length. Ruth eventually began to write poems.  At age 12, her father introduced her to A.R. Orage (editor of New Age) who began to publish her poems. Her first volume of poetry is entitled First Poems (1920) with the second entitled First and Second Poems (1927). During the First World War, she was employed as a junior temporary clerk at the War Office.  After that, she became a painter. She and another worker Kathleen O’Hara began a business Deane and Forester.  They painted furniture as well as trays and other “gift goods” with flowers.  She continued to publish poetry: Persephone in Hades (1931), A Mad Lady’s Garland (1934), A Trophy of Arms: Poems (1926-35), a Hawthornden Prize winner in 1937, and The Spirit Watches (1939).  A mutual friend, Lord David Cecil, passed Ruth’s poetry on to C.S. Lewis, which he immensely enjoyed.  In fact, Cecil’s letters claim that Lewis “went off to buy your poems” (Letters-Volume 3, 1961). After hearing Lewis’s Mere Christianity talks on the BBC, Ruth converted to Christianity. She continued to publish poetry, The Rude Potato (1941), Poem (1943), The Bridge: Poems 1939-44 (1945), Pitter on Cats (1946), and Urania (1950).  Ruth’s first volume of poems were published as The Ermine: Poems 1942-1952 (1953).  This collection won the William Heinemann Award.  She also won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955.

C.S. Lewis maintained a long friendship with Ruth.  George Sayer even writes that, in 1955, Lewis went to visit Ruth.  After this visit, Lewis remarked that if he had not been a confirmed bachelor, he would have married Ruth Pitter.  Ruth had only met Joy Davidman, Lewis’s future wife, once on a February 1954. Although Lewis had hoped the two women could kindle a friendship, the two never warmed to one another.  Lewis asked if Ruth would write Joy a letter while she was in the hospital (shortly before their marriage), Ruth replied,

I had been taught in youth that a woman’s friendship with a married man must be by grace and favour of his wife, and as Joy recovered and lived on so amazingly, I did from time to time write to her; but there was never any reply, so I decided to be thankful for this correspondence and friendship with so rare a creature as Lewis, and to leave it at that.

(Vol 3 – 1064)

 Katharine Farrer

Katharine Farrer was the wife of philosopher, theologian, and biblical scholar Austin Farrer. Austin Farrer was a friend to C.S. Lewis who achieved a First in Classical Honour Moderations, Literae Humaniores, and Theology at Oxford. Austin was witness to the civil marriage of Lewis and Joy on 23 April 1956, he gave Joy her last rites on her deathbed, and eventually conducted Joy’s funeral. Some of his published works included Finite and Infinite: A Philosophical Essay, The Freedom of the Will, and The Glass of Vision: The Making of St. John’s Apocalypse.  He also authored works of Biblical exegesis including St. Matthew and St. Mark and The Revelation of St. John the Divine.

Photo of Austin Farrer courtesy of barnabyperkins.blogspot.com

Farrer’s wife Katharine, also known as “K” in the letters, was always a warm and inviting presence. She was one of the first friends of Lewis’s to meet Joy Davidman.  Katharine was a writer herself, translating Gabriel Marcel’s Etre to Avoir as Being and Having, writing a novel titled At Odds with Morning, in addition to three detective novels she discusses with Lewis in her correspondence: The Missing Link, Cretan Counterfeit, and Gownman’s Gallows. It was Katharine who felt the sudden urge to call Joy Davidman on 18 October 1956.  At that very moment, Joy tripped over the telephone wire.  When she fell, the bone in her leg (which was later discovered to be eaten up with cancer) snapped. Joy could hear Katharine on the phone but could not respond. Katharine and Austin took Joy to the hospital. where her cancer was discovered by doctors.

Austin Farrer  often lectured abroad and Katharine accompanied him.  In 1966, they travelled to Baton Rouge, Louisiana through the swamp.  The host did not know that Katharine wrote detective novels and was taken aback when she exclaimed, “What a lovely place to hide a body!”

Mary Willis Shelburne – “The American Lady”

Mary was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1895.  When Mary was three, the family moved to Richmond, where Mary was educated at Chatham Episcopal Institute and later Westhampton College. On 30 June 1920, she married William Boyer in Tazewell County, Virginia.  Her first husband unfortunately passed away, and Mary married Jacob Shelburne in Richmond in 1933.  After nine years of marriage, Jacob sadly passed away, leaving Mary twice widowed.

Mary was an established poet, occupying a position on the board of the Poetry Society of Virginia as well as being a member of the Poetry Society of America.  She was published in Poet Lore, the New York Times, and the Saturday Evening Post.  She won the Barrow Poetry Prize of the Georgia Poetry Society in 1952.  The follow poem appeared in the Saturday Evening Post in April 1947

Love is like water; it may run

Smooth as silver under the sun;

Dance to the music of the wind,

free as breath, and unconfined,

Sing its song in liquid, cool

Polished depth of a woodland pool

Surge with wild emotion, caught

in tumult that a storm has wrought;

hold in hidden caves of wonder

Passion swift and hot as thunder,

or sweep the debris all away

and love again another day.

After the death of her second husband, Mary moved to Washington D.C. in 1946 to work as an executive assistant to the Canon Precentor of Washington Cathedral. Continually haunted by the possibility of poverty, Mary worried for most of her life about meeting her financial obligations.  In her correspondence with Lewis, she discusses her fiscal woes. Lewis, at first, could not contribute any money due to national restrictions. However, thanks to Lewis’s friend and attorney Owen Barfield, Lewis was able to assist Mary financially through his American publisher.  Hooper remarks that these payments continued after Lewis’s death. She died in 1975. Their correspondence has its own volume: Letters to an American Lady.

From his letter to Mary Shelburne dated 28 June 1963:

Think of yourself just as a seed patiently waiting in the earth: waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener’s good time, up into the real world, the real waking.  I suppose that our whole present life, looked back on from there, will seem only a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter. 

Dorothy Sayer

 Photo courtesy of payingattentiontothesky.com

Perhaps Lewis’s most well-known female correspondent was mystery novelist, translator, and theologian Dorothy Sayers. Sayers was the child of a clergyman who studied at Oxford and later penned the entertaining detective Lord Peter Wimsey novels. Sayers was one of the first women to receive her B.A. degree from Oxford in 1920 (before then, women could attend classes at Oxford, but were not awarded a degree). Dorothy also wrote religious plays such as The Zeal of Thy House and The Man Born to be King.  After receiving a “glowing review” from Inkling Charles Williams on her mystery novel The Nine Taylors, she began a correspondence with Williams until his death in 1945.  She began one with C.S. Lewis shortly after. Aside from the fame she won with her Lord Wimsey novels and religious plays (which Lewis cites as a significant “contemporary” work), Sayer also translated Dante, The Comedy of Dante Alighieri  the Florentine, Cantica II: Purgatory.  Although Sayer maintained a firm friendship with several members, she was never fully adopted into the Inklings because she was female.  The Inklings still operated on traditional beliefs, preferring male company to female company.  More will be explained on this in a later post.

There are several others, Mary Van Deusen, Vera Mathews Gebbert, Genia Goelz, Rhona Bodle, and of course, Joy Davidman, who wrote faithfully to Lewis over the years.  He was always a congenial, caring correspondent.  For further information, I implore you to read The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volumes 1-3.  They are also available as e-versions.

Next week, we will discuss a woman who “locked horns” with Lewis over the issue of naturalism at the Socratic Club and WON the debate, causing Lewis to complete revisions on one of his much-loved works.  Her name was Elizabeth Anscombe.

Week Three of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

Furlough and Fascination: Mrs. Moore

 

“I must admit fate has played strange with me since last winter.  I feel that I have definitely got into a new epoch of life and one feels extraordinarily helpless over it…As for the older days of real walks far away in the hills…Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life”

–          Letter to Arthur Greeves 28 October 1917

In the winter of 1916, C.S. Lewis went to sit for his scholarship examination at Oxford. Lewis dreamed of becoming of scholar, but the reality was World War I was at hand, and many of Lewis’s acquaintances from his school days were now training to become soldiers. Despite the increasingly ominous political climate in England, Lewis continued to pursue his academic aspirations.  Having trained with his tutor Mr. Kirkpatrick, Lewis initially approached Oxford with great confidence.  The next morning after his arrival, Lewis and other young men braved the snow to take exams in the Hall of Oriel.  The boys all wrote “in greatcoats and mufflers and wearing at least our left-hand gloves” (SJB 185). Lewis’s confidence soon wilted and he “had the impression that I was doing badly”.  He later arrived home and told his father that he “almost certainly failed”.  However, Lewis had miscalculated, for just a few weeks later, he found — to his great surprise and joy– that he had been elected to University.

In the summer of 1917, Lewis entered the University Officer’s Training Corps “as my most promising route into the army”.  Although he failed the mathematical portion of Responsions, he states that a “benevolent decree exempted ex-servicemen from taking it”.  As odd as it seems, Lewis must credit his acceptance into Oxford (and his subsequent 29-year career afterward as a tutor and don) on this “benevolent decree”.   Due to his repeated failures in mathematics, Lewis could not have entered Oxford otherwise.  Lewis had only spent a few weeks at Oxford when his “papers came through” and he was enlisted into the army.  He was drafted into a Cadet Battalion at Keble College. While at Keble, Lewis roomed with another young Irishman named Edward Francis Courtney “Paddy” Moore.

C.S. Lewis (left) with Paddy Moore (right)

Paddy’s mother, Janie Moore, was a 45-year-old “divorcee” (divorce was only granted in rare circumstances) who remained happily separated from her husband Courtenay Edward Moore, a civil engineer in Ireland she later referred to as “The Beast”.  Although she and her daughter Maureen lived in Bristol, they moved to Oxford after Paddy was assigned to Keble.

Not long after they had kindled a friendship, Paddy invited Lewis home to meet his mother.  Thus began a strange and controversial relationship.  Walter Hooper writes in They Stand Together that, “Lewis seems to have taken a great liking to Mrs. Moore from the first and even, as this and subsequent letters show, to have been youthfully infatuated with her” (199). In a letter to his father which described his visit, Lewis states, “Moore, my room mate, comes from Clifton and is a very decent sort of man: his mother, an Irish lady, is staying up here and I have met her once or twice”.  Then, the following week, Lewis exclaims to his father: “I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoyed myself” (Letters of C.S. Lewis 64). Mrs. Moore, like Lewis’s mother Flora, was the daughter of an Irish clergyman.  To the young Lewis, she seemed a suitable replacement, perhaps an echo of the mother he had lost years earlier. Alas, Lewis became almost a second son to Mrs. Moore, electing to spend the majority of his September 1917 furlough (three of the four weeks) with the Moores.  During that time, Lewis came down with a feverish cold and Mrs. Moore “nursed him back to health” (All My Road Before Me 2). Lewis spent the final week with his father in Belfast before being gazetted into the 3^rd Somerset Light Infantry.  It is believed that Lewis admitted to his boyhood friend and lifelong correspondent Arthur Greeves the extent of his affection for Mrs. Moore during this final week of furlough.  However, in a letter dated 29 October 1917, Lewis regrettably writes: “Since coming back & meeting a certain person I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did.  I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try & forget my various statements & not refer to the subject. Of course I have perfect trust in you, mon vieux, but still I have no business to go discussing those sort of things with you.  So in the future that topic must be taboo between us” (They Stand Together 200).  Lewis still mentioned Mrs. Moore in his letters, claiming to Arthur in December 1917 that he and Mrs. Moore “are the two people who matter most to me in the world” (They Stand Together 204).

Just before they were assigned, Maureen overheard Paddy and Lewis make an oral pact; if either Paddy or Lewis dies in battle, the other would care for his surviving parent.  This was a promise that both men enthusiastically made, but assumed would be unnecessary.

In November, Lewis’s regiment was headed to the front lines of the war after a 48-hour leave.  Because the trips to and from Ireland would consume the entire 48 hours, Lewis went to Mrs. Moore’s in Bristol and sent an urgent telegram to his father: “Have arrived Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol.  If so meet at Station. Reply Mrs. Moore’s address…Jack”. Unfortunately, Albert could not understand the telegram.  By the time Lewis sent a second telegram to his father expressing clarification, the time was nearly expired.  Albert did not come to Bristol and the youngest Lewis was sent to France to fight on the front lines.  As time progressed, Lewis kept close contact with Mrs. Moore, and he was well-acquainted with her worry and distress when Paddy was reported missing in the spring of 1918.  In a letter to his father, Lewis writes, “My friend Mrs. Moore is in great trouble – Paddy has been missing for over a month and is almost certainly dead.  Of all my own particular set at Keble he has been the first to go, and it is pathetic to remember that he at least was always certain that he would come through” (Letters of C.S. Lewis 79).

Lewis with Mrs. Moore

Photo courtesy of sullivanfiles.net

On 15 April 1918, Lewis was wounded at the Battle of Arras at Mount Bernenchon.  He was transferred to Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London on 25 May.  All the while, he was begging his father to visit him, but Albert refused to interrupt his daily work ritual.  He considered his routine quite a sacred thing; Warnie Lewis states that he had “an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence” (Letters to C.S. Lewis 30).  Albert would not visit his son, much to Lewis’s dismay and disappointment.  In one poignant letter, the young Lewis pleads with his father,

I know I have often been far from what I should in my relations to you, and have undervalued an affection and a generosity which …an experience of ‘other people’s parents’ has shown me in a new light. But, please God, I shall be better in the future.  Come and see me.  I am homesick, that is the long and the short of it…this week Mrs. Moore has been up on a visit to her sister who works at the War Office, and we have seen a good deal of each other.  I think it some comfort to her to be with someone who was a friend of Paddy’s and is a link with the Oxford days: she has certainly been a very, very good friend to me (84).

 In June, Lewis was transferred to a hospital near Bristol, to enjoy Mrs. Moore’s companionship as he convalesced. Months passed, and Lewis’s father was still notably absent.  That fall, it was confirmed that Paddy was indeed deceased.  Mrs. Moore had lost her son, Lewis had ostensibly lost his father.  What was there to do but to cling to each other?  When their mother passed away, Lewis and his brother Warnie relied upon one another.  Now Mrs. Moore was reaching for her “second son” to comfort her, a young man just a few days younger than her own beloved Paddy.  After Paddy’s death, the bond between Lewis and Moore was strengthened and solidified. When Lewis was moved to Hampshire in October, Mrs. Moore went with him. Lewis was transferred to a hospital in Eastbourne for the final weeks of his recovery; Mrs. Moore rented an apartment near the camp.

 

Lewis, Maureen, and Mrs. Moore

Photo courtesy of cslewis.drzeus.net

 At the conclusion of the war, Lewis resumed his studies in Oxford.  Despite his negligence during the war, Albert Lewis generously funded his son’s continuing studies as Lewis matriculated through three different programs (Lewis achieved a First in Honour Moderations, Greats, and English).  Lewis now considered Mrs. Moore and Maureen his “family”.  Unbeknownst to Albert, they had moved with Lewis to Oxford.  Lewis was, most likely, helping Mrs. Moore meet her financial obligations. The money she received from her “ex-husband” was clearly not sufficient.  Lewis mentions in a letter to Arthur Greeves that “we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room” (emphasis added).  Note Lewis’s use of the plural pronoun– “we”.  After his three required terms of living at University College, Lewis was allowed to obtain other lodgings.  Lewis then moved in with the Moores, but they all suffered under the continual threat of poverty.  Before they collectively purchased The Kilns in 1930, the trio moved nine times.  Walter Hooper illuminates that the achievements of Lewis’s “Firsts” at Oxford were obtained all while juggling domestic responsibilities in the home as well as moving his belongings to several different locations.

Albert, over time, had become suspicious of Mrs. Moore.  Even when Lewis was in Belfast during leaves and furloughs, Mrs. Moore wrote nearly every day in care of Lewis’s friend Arthur Greeves.  Why couldn’t these letters be delivered to Little Lea?

Albert Lewis

Photo courtesy of  nancemarie.blogspot.com

Were Lewis and Mrs. Moore concerned that Albert would discover their “relationship”?  Albert questioned the nature of their attachment.  It was discovered that the young Lewis –still a professed atheist at this point — was deceiving his father about his whereabouts as well as the people in his company. Albert discussed this strange and unnatural arrangement with his older son Warnie.  Warnie replied on 10 May 1920:

The Mrs. Moore business is certainly a mystery but I think perhaps you are making too much of it.  Have you any idea of the footing on which he is with her?  Is she an intellectual?  It seems to me preposterous that there can be anything in it.  But the whole thing irritates me by its freakishness.

Albert replied,

I confess I do not know what to do or say about Jack’s affair.  It worries and depresses me greatly.  All I know about the lady is that she is old enough to be his mother – that she is separated from her husband and that she is in poor circumstances.  I also know that Jacks has frequently drawn cheques in her favour running up to ₤10 – for what I don’t know.  If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill, I should not be so uneasy.  Then there is the husband whom I have been told is a scoundrel – but the absent are always to blame – some where in the background, who some of these days might try a little amiable black mailing. But outside all these considerations that may be the outcome of a suspicious, police court mind, there is a distraction from work and the folly of the daily letters. Altogether I am uncomfortable.

 Mrs. Moore, Maureen, and Lewis purchased The Kilns in 1930.  Lewis and Moore’s relationship seemed to shift after Lewis’s conversion; He often referred to her as “Mother” in his correspondence. He continued to dote on her, the “surrogate mother” although it was well-documented that Warnie (who moved into The Kilns after retirement) didn’t prefer her company. Mrs. Moore remained at The Kilns until she developed dementia, a ravenous disease which altered Moore’s otherwise amiable personality. Lewis took on an increasing number of the household chores and nursing responsibilities as her illness progressed, while still producing an impressive amount of published works, both scholarly and imaginative. Once the dementia reached advanced stages, Mrs. Moore was transferred to a retirement facility.  Lewis visited Mrs. Moore every day until her death in 1951.

**Reader’s Note: Lewis often refers to Mrs. Moore as “Minto” (pet name – we are unsure if it’s origin). In All My Road Before Me, editor Walter Hooper uses “D” for the Greek letter Delta.

So how do we define the relationship between Lewis and Mrs. Moore?

Many biographers, including most recently Alister McGrath, tackle this issue.  Some claim that a sexual relationship between Lewis and Moore is sensationalized, a exaggerated product of mere speculation.  There has not been, to date, any definitive evidence that Lewis and Moore had a passionate affair.  George Sayer, a friend of Lewis for nearly thirty years, originally posited that he was unsure, quoting Lewis’s friend Owen Barfield who suggested that the chance was “fifty fifty”.  However, in the 1997 edition of his well-received biography Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis, Sayer admits:

I have had to alter my opinion of Lewis’s relationship with Mrs. Moore. In chapter eight of this book I wrote that I was uncertain about whether they were lovers. Now after conversations with Mrs. Moore’s daughter, Maureen, and a consideration of the way in which their bedrooms were arranged at The Kilns, I am quite certain that they were.

Even Walter Hooper admits this in his introduction to All My Road Before Me:

The notion of sexual intimacy between the two must be regarded as likely.  The sensual young atheist lives with a not unattractive woman, still in early middle age, who is not only available to him but very likely possessed of an agenda of her own: the young man is, as his father points out, fundamentally good-natured and easily manipulated, and the woman – in that society, at that time – would surely benefit from the presence of a man in the household. This combination of motive, means, and opportunity invites, though it does not demand, the conclusion that Janie King Moore and C.S. Lewis were lovers.

How long did the affair last?  We do not and cannot know.  As mentioned earlier, Lewis considered the subject “taboo”, even with close friends. It was Lewis’s private life, and thus was his own business. However, some argue that Lewis, as spokesman for the Christian faith, must live a transparent life.   Lewis writes to Bernard Acworth on 4 October, 1951: “When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the lookout for things that might discredit him”.  After Lewis’s conversion, did he amend his relationship with Mrs. Moore?  Most biographers believe that he did. For many, it is unsettling to consider Lewis in an Oedipal relationship with a married woman.  However, Lewis’s new faith baptized his heart, mind, and body.  There was a holistic change; and Lewis perhaps perceived himself now as a protector and provider for his adopted “family”.  He was an individual steeped in honesty and integrity (despite the earlier episodes of lying to his father which he regretted later in life).  That is where the fascination and curiosity must surrender to the mystery. We don’t know the depth of his involvement with Mrs. Moore, but we do know that he had an undimishing loyalty and respect for her.  If they had a sexual relationship, it is clear that it evolved from Eros to Phileo.  What began with passion had settled into genuine fondness. We also know that Lewis’s inspiring works originate from a place of spiritual maturity, wisdom, and obedience – a much different place than that of a twenty-something, “priggish” aspiring scholar.

In the end, Lewis stayed true to the pact he entered with Paddy long ago.  He took great care of Mrs. Moore.  Reciprocally, she taught him generosity and hospitality. There is no doubt that Lewis and Moore shared an enduring affection for one another, an affection that survived war, grief, disappointment, poverty, and lasting illness.  Walter Hooper said it best, as he continues in his introduction from All My Road Before Me:

Thus it is unwise to overinterpret.  The nature of their intimacy, its duration, and the circumstances under which it ended are largely unknown to us.  What is known is the day-to-day devotion shown by C.S. Lewis to Mrs. Moore until her death, after a long mental and physical decline, at the age of 78. Life is more richly textured – or as Lewis would put it, ‘thicker’ – than we expect it to be.  None of us is either this or that; rather we and all the ‘ordinary’ people we meet and know are many things at once, full of shading and nuance.  This story may have begun in self-indulgence, cynicism and sin, but it ended as an enduring exemplum of Christian charity – and of Divine Economy (All My Road Before Me 9).

Next week, we will take a brief look Lewis’s female correspondents, including a nun, widows, and aspiring poets!!

 

Works Utilized in this Post

Surprised by Joy – C.S. Lewis

All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922-1927, Edited by Walter Hooper

They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, Edited by Walter Hooper

The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3 – Edited by Walter Hooper

Letters of C.S. Lewis – Edited by Walter Hooper

Jack: The Life of C.S. Lewis – George Sayer

Week Two of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

Image of Cherbourg House courtesy of Sullivanfiles.net

Miss G.E. Cowie, matron at Cherbourg House

“Nothing was further from her intention than to destroy my faith; she could not tell that the room into which she brought this candle was full of gunpowder” (Surprised by Joy 60)

In September of 1908, Lewis was still secretly mourning the loss of his mother who had, a month prior, succumbed to cancer.  Lewis’s father Albert, disoriented from grief, sent his two young sons to continue their education at Wynyard School (what Lewis refers to as “Belsen” in Surprised by Joy).  Walter Hooper admits that this was “a terrible introduction to England” for the boys.  Now, not only was Lewis divorced from his dear home of Little Lea, he was removed entirely from his native Ireland.  Perhaps Albert assumed that distance would mend the boys’ broken hearts.

If that was Albert’s intention, it did little to diminish the grief of either son, particularly young Clive (“Jack”).  Wynyard, an instructional vessel steered by the tyrannous schoolmaster Reverend Robert Capron (affectionately called “Oldie” or “Oldy” by the students), was a poor choice.  In a letter written just days after the boys’ arrival, Warnie pleads with his father to remove them: “You have never refused me anything Papy and I know you won’t refuse me this – that I may leave Wynyard.  Jack wants to too” (Hooper 7). Albert chose Wynyard because its tuition was more affordable than other prominent schools, including Rhyl in Wales.  Albert wanted his boys to acquire the advantage of a public school education, one that would hopefully lead to acceptance at the prestigious universities of Cambridge or Oxford.  However, Wynyard would not suffice.  In addition to being adrift on the  “shoreless ocean of arithmetic” (pragmatic courses with little instruction in the arts), Lewis and the other boys were exposed to Oldie’s consistent fits of rage.  Walter Hooper, in C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works, writes that Oldie was facing legal action with the High Court on charges of brutality. In Surprised by Joy (SBJ), Lewis devotes several pages to Oldie, describing at length his intolerable, ineffective leadership.  He recalls Oldie’s severe punishment for seemingly frivolous crimes, of violently beating his cane across students’ desks while screaming, “Think.  Think.  THINK!”  Lewis writes in SBJ:

“In another way too Oldie’s school presently repeated my home experience. Oldie’s wife died; and in term time. He reacted to bereavement by becoming more violent that before; so much so that Wee Wee [Capron’s son] made a kind of apology for him to the boys. You will remember that I had already learned to fear and hate emotion; here was a fresh reason to do so” (33)

Both brothers begged to be released from Oldie’s oppressive grasp. In May 1909, Warnie moved to Malvern College. His little brother somehow survived Wynyard until 1910, when the High Court began pursuing charges against Oldie.  Shortly thereafter, the school collapsed. Eventually Oldie was declared insane (Jack described Oldie as “eccentric” in his first letter home – how perceptive the young Lewis was!). The youngest Lewis spent a semester at Campbell College in Belfast.  In January 1911, the Lewis boys returned to England, both now enrolled at Malvern.  C.S. Lewis attended school at the nearby Cherbourg House.  Here he was introduced to instructors such as Harry Wakelyn Smith (“Smewgy”), who played a significant role in fostering Lewis’s enduring affection for poetry.

It was also at Cherbourg House that Lewis met Miss Cowie (“Miss C” in SBJ).  She was the matron of the school, a compassionate and diligent lady who embraced the young Lewis as a surrogate son.  Miss Cowie paid extra attention to the “orphan” Lewis, as he mentions in SBJ:

“…I must begin with dear Miss C., the Matron.  No school ever had a better Matron, more skilled and comforting to boys in sickness, or more cheery and companionable to boys in health.  She was one of the most selfless people I have ever known.  We all loved her; I, the orphan, especially.  Now it so happened that miss C., who seemed old to me, was still in her spiritual immaturity, still hunting, with the eagerness of a soul that had a touch of angelic quality in it, for a truth and a way of life. Guides were even rarer then than now.  She was (as I should now put it) floundering in the mazes of Theosophy [Lewis’s friend and attorney Owen Barfield also practiced Theosophy], Rosicrucianism, Spiritualism; the whole Anglo-American Occultist tradition.  Nothing was further from her intention than to destroy my faith; she could not tell that the room into which she brought this candle was full of gunpowder.  I had never heard of such things before; never, except in a nightmare or a fairy tale, conceived of spirits other than God and men…But the result of Miss C.’s conversation did not stop there.  Little by little, unconsciously, unintentionally, she loosened the whole framework, blunted all the sharp edges of my belief.  The vagueness, the merely speculative character, of all this Occultism began to spread – yes, and to spread deliciously – the stern truths of the creed The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) ‘altering ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel’.’” (59-60)

 Miss Cowie introduced Lewis to a world of spiritual ambiguities, of enigmatic philosophies, and offered the young boy relief from his nagging conscience. She showed biased affection for him.  George Sayer mentions that Cowie “mothered” Lewis to what the administrators considered a disturbing degree. Sayer also revealed that Cowie’s dismissal originated from the long, nurturing embraces she had with Lewis, as well as her insistence that his letters home did not require censorship.  All letters home were read by school staff, a practice that the young Lewis found “disgracefully tyrannical” (Sayer 31).

But one must remember that the young Lewis was thirteen during this time.  This is why the administrators were alarmed when they found Cowie “holding Jack in her arms”.  He was on the cusp of adolescence and maturity, and other adults found this strange attachment unbecoming and inappropriate. Malvern, on the surface, had been a pleasant experience.  But Lewis reveals in SBJ that he was mercilessly bullied by the older boys and mocked for his apparent lack of athletic skill.  Here, he found an ally, a woman who in the absence of his mother had showered him with feminine affection.  Now, she was promptly removed from his life, leaving him at the mercy of the bullies and the lofty pretentions of the schoolmaster and instructors (Sayer mentions that headmaster A.C. Allen was a good teacher, but “lacked” the ability to “be able to identify students who might need help with emotional problems”). Furthermore, Miss Cowie’s philosophical cocktail had left Lewis asking uncomfortable questions about religion, questions that contradicted and perhaps negated the principles discussed in his grandfather’s pulpit.  Perry Bramlett writes in the essay “Lewis the Reluctant Convert: Surprised by Faith”, “There was no deliberate attempt by her to destroy Lewis’s faith; her singular manner of religious and spiritualistic questioning seemed so exciting that Lewis’s conventional religion by contrast, seemed dull and unattractive” (C.S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy edited by Bruce Edwards 107).

Despite this brief flirtation with rationalism, Lewis would eventually return to Christianity.  This complicated journey equipped him to speak to religious skeptics about the “discrepancies” between intellect and faith.  After time at Malvern, Lewis came under the tutelage of “The Great Knock”, his father’s former tutor Mr. Kirkpatrick.  Kirkpatrick assisted Lewis for the Oxford entrance exams known as Responsions. Lewis performed poorly on the mathematical section, but was offered admission as part of the Officer’s Training Corps.  Europe was going to war and Lewis would find himself, just a few years later, engaged in the Great War.  This was not the romantic notions of war depicted in Homer; this conflict acquainted him with the hideous face of death he had first glimpsed with his mother, but would also lead Lewis to another woman, one he would refer to in later correspondence as “Mother”.  However, the true terms of their relationship continue to stir controversy today.

Next week, we discuss “Furlough and Fascination”, the inimitable (and married) Mrs. Moore.

Works utilized in this post include:

Surprised by Joy – C.S. Lewis

Jack: C.S. Lewis and His Times  – George Sayer

C.S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works – Walter Hooper

C.S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy (4 volumes), edited by Bruce Edwards (I HIGHLY recommend you acquire this set. It is an asset to my personal library!)

Week One of the C.S. Lewis and Women Series

Please note: In the following post, I will refer to C.S. Lewis as “Jack” to simply distinguish him from other members of his family.   I typically refer to him as “Lewis”, but to avoid confusion for this installment of the series, I will use “Jack” (since he detested the name “Clive”).

Photo courtesy of cslewis.drzeus.net

The Sinking of Atlantis: Flora Lewis

A Post on Her Birthday 

“With my mother’s death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life.  There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security.  It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis”

– Surprised by Joy

 February 15, 1908 – Three doctors walked through the stately iron gate surrounding a modest home on the outskirts of Belfast, Northern Ireland.  The medical team (assisted by two nurses who had arrived the night before) came equipped with various instruments used to perform surgery which would hopefully prolong the life of a woman plagued with abdominal cancer.  Their patient was a 45-year-old mother of two and wife of a court solictor, Flora Lewis.  In the past, Flora wrestled with headaches, fatigue, and a loss of appetite.  Once the diagnosis was made, doctors and nurses worked exhaustively to restore her health.  As was the custom,  her surgery was performed in the home, on a table on the first floor.

 

Little Lea, taken by Crystal Hurd in May 2011

It is difficult to comprehend such an ominous sight.  Her youngest son, Clive Staples or “Jack”, must have endured unimaginable apprehension.  According to his correspondence with Nurse Davison (the “senior nurse” over Flora’s care), the young Lewis seemed determined to bear his mother’s illness with feigned fortitude, an armor of apathy that would surely tarnish as the years passed:

“Do you remember the first night before my poor mother’s operation when you both sat and talked about operations and I said

‘Well you are gloomy people'”  – letter dated September 29, 1929

After his older brother Warren was sent to an English preparatory school, Jack had grown close to his mother.  Although the Lewis boys had a nurse who read to them and taught them nursery rhymes (Lizzy Endicott) and a governess (Miss Harper), Flora attempted to educate her sons when she could.  Despite her nagging headaches and frequent episodes of bedrest, she instructed her youngest son in Latin, French, and math (which as many know, was a weak subject for Jack).  She was a woman of substantial intellect, earning a degree in math from Queen’s College in an age where most women settled into the conventional expectation as homemaker. This caused her to be teased a great deal. Her father, Thomas Hamilton, was vicar at Saint Mark’s Dundela.  She was descended from a long line of “clergyman, lawyers, sailors, and the like” (Sayer 4).

Photos of St. Mark’s, the vicarage, and the famous “Lion Head” doorknob

Photos taken by Crystal Hurd in May 2011

Flora met her future husband at her father’s church.  George Sayer writes that Flora first courted Albert’s brother William.  After deciding that she simply “could never love [William]”, she swapped him for his younger brother.  Albert was a eloquent speaker, which, as Jack claims in Surprised by Joy, illustrated his great promise as a politician.  The Lewis boys experienced a bit of ying and yang in their parents, with a passionate, argumentative father and a cool, tranquil mother: “My father’s people were true Welshmen, sentimental, passionate, and rhetorical, easily moved both to anger and to tenderness; men who laughed and cried a great deal and who had not much of the talent for happiness” (3).  This was in great contrast to his mother, whose family was a “cooler race” in which their “minds were critical and ironic and they had the talent for happiness in a high degree – went straight for it as experienced travelers go for the best seat in a train” (3).  Sayer disagrees with this statement, as he remarks that Thomas Hamilton often  railed against Roman Catholicism in the pulpit while her mother incessantly argued politics, namely the restoration of Irish nationalism and Home Rule.

 Nonetheless, the marriage endured.  Albert worked tirelessly, leaving his children with his wife and the house staff.  Flora wrote short stories and articles that her husband critiqued but which, unfortunately, were never published.  In her better days, she travelled often with her sons while her husband was preoccupied with work.  Jack remembered these holidays with much fondness.

After that fateful February morning, Flora experienced a brief period of convalescence.  In May, Flora felt well enough to take her two sons to a house in Castlerock, located in County Derry.  Due to the damp Irish climate and the consistent fear that Jack suffered from a “weak chest”, Flora often took her sons to this northern resort for warmer temperatures and relaxation.

Photo courtesy of www.richardcrowe.co.uk

But the season of hope and healing would not last.  In June, Flora was ordered to remain on bedrest. Her symptons continued to worsen and on the morning of August 23 (Albert’s birthday), Flora passed away.  The night before, Albert spoke to her about the goodness of God, to which she poignantly inquired, “What have we done for Him?”  Albert later reflected in his notebook that Flora was, “As good a woman, wife and mother as God has ever given a man”.

 A stiff, uncomfortable nine-year-old Jack was brought in to view the body of his recently deceased mother.  He recounts this episode with great horror in Surprised by Joy:

“Grief in childhood is complicated with many other mysteries. I was taken into the bedroom where my mother lay dead; as they said, ‘to see her,’ in reality, as I at once knew, ‘to see it.’ There was nothing that a grown-up would call disfigurement – except for that total disfigurement which is death itself.  Grief was overwhelmed in terror.  To this day I do not know what they mean when they call dead bodies beautiful. The ugliest man alive is an angel compared with the loveliest of the dead. Against all the subsequent paraphernalia of coffin, flowers, hearse, and funeral I reacted with horror…To my hatred for what I already felt to be all the fuss and flummery of the funeral I may perhaps trace something in me which I now recognize as a defect but which I have never fully overcome – a distaste for all that is public, all that belongs to the collective; a boorish inaptitude for formality.”  (19-20)

Jack would come to face a stark truth – it would take years, perhaps the rest of his life, to recover from Flora’s death.  In fact, the feeling would revisit him many years later, as his wife Joy was dying of cancer. Surely Jack felt empathy for her sons David and Douglas.  There is a remnant of this sensation found in The Magician’s Nephew when Digory Kirke asks Aslan for a Narnian apple to restore his mother’s health.  In his fictional tale, Jack could control the outcome; in the conclusion of The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan gives Digory an apple to heal his mother.

But life seldom imitates art. There is little doubt that Jack was haunted by Flora’s death for the rest of his life. He admits to Phyllis Elinor Sandeman on December 31, 1953:

“I can well understand how in addition to, and mingling with, the void and loneliness, there is a great feeling of unprotectedness and a horror of coping with all the things – the harsh, outer world – from which you have hitherto been shielded.  I first met this ‘cold blast on the naked heath’ at about 9, when my Mother died, and there has never really been any sense of security and snugness since.  That is, I’ve not quite succeeded in growing up on that point: there is still too much of ‘Mammy’s little lost boy’ about me.”

Flora’s absence left Jack and Warnie alone with their workaholic father. Jack wrote at length about his father’s lack of interest in his sons, mainly because Albert preferred to work. Did the young sons remind Albert of the painful loss of his wife?  Did he retreat further into his career as a coping mechanism? As Jack entered early adulthood, he nurtured a growing resentment for his father. This is evidenced in his correspondence, but is also mentioned in Surprised by Joy.  Jack mentions that Albert was less like a father, and more like a much older brother. Perhaps Lewis displaced some of his anger on his father. Jack and Warnie relied on each other for support, and struggled with their father’s ostensible lack of emotion.  Jack would later relinquish much of his pain and become more understanding of his father long after Albert’s death.

It is imperative to note that Jack was surrounded almost exclusively by males at Little Lea (not counting Aunt Annie); in other words, women were present in Jack’s early life, but mainly absent during his late childhood and early adolescence (a crucial period during which many males form opinions about the opposite sex).  After Flora’s death,  Jack found himself wisked off to school and away from his former sanctuary. He was placed in all-male boarding schools, where boys were mercilessly judged by their displays of aggression and athleticism.  Surely he missed his mother and felt that her passing had drastically altered the trajectory of his life (at minimum, it interrupted his childhood). Between the horrible bullying he endured to the emotional bankruptcy demonstrated by his father, Jack struggled to find footing in this unfamiliar new life.  Flora left a vacuum, a deep, unrelenting wound.  Jack would find himself utterly alone and seeking answers from God, from teachers, from schoolmates and colleagues. Her death would catalyze a long, labyrithine journey from God and a returning to God, truly proving that “the longest way round is the shortest way home”.

But in the meantime, young Jack would find refuge in one woman, a woman who became a surrogate mother to the “orphaned” boy and paid a heavy price for her affection.

Next week, I will share her story, the story of Ms. Cowie.