Читать книгу C. S. Lewis: A Biography - A. Wilson N. - Страница 12

Lewis returned to University College, Oxford, in January 1919. Because of his experiences in the war, he was excused the matriculation requirements, Responsions and Divinity. Had he chosen to do so, he could also have dispensed with the first of his public examinations, Honour Moderations, ‘Mods’ (that is to say, Latin and Greek Literature), and proceeded straight to the second part of the Classics course, Ancient History and Philosophy (Literae Humaniores, or Greats). He had decided, however, upon an academic career, and was advised that for this he would do better to take the whole course.

Many of the books, perhaps most of them, that he was studying for Mods were already familiar to him. Being a naturally fluent reader with a brilliant teacher in W. T. Kirkpatrick, he would probably have been equipped to get a good mark in Mods in his last month at Great Bookham. The first four terms of his Oxford life were therefore a delightful opportunity to taste again, and at greater leisure, at familiar wells. For example, at Gastons, he had read through the Bacchae of Euripides in Greek and compared it with the poetic English rendering, which he much admired, of Gilbert Murray. At Oxford, he had the chance to attend lectures on the Bacchae by Murray himself – the brilliant young Australian who had become a Professor of Greek at Glasgow in his early twenties and had now returned to his old university to occupy the Regius Chair of Greek. ‘He is a real inspiration,’ Lewis wrote, ‘quite as good as his best books, if only he did not dress so horribly, worse even than most dons.’¹

Other intellectual stimulation came from his membership of an undergraduate society called the Martlets, a group that met once a week in term-time to discuss a subject of common interest and hear one of their members read a paper. An essay which particularly took Lewis’s fancy was one on the poetry of Henry Newbolt, read by a man called Basil Wyllie. ‘I hadn’t thought the subject very promising but he quoted a great many good things I hadn’t known – especially a queer little song about grasshoppers.’² When we follow Lewis’s reading over his first couple of terms, it is sometimes hard to remember that he is at this point studying Latin and Greek rather than English Literature. Gibbon, Shakespeare’s King John and Troilus and Cressida (‘a very good play’), Layamon’s Brut and Wace in the Everyman translation and an unnamed book of philosophy which took him eight weeks to read were all devoured in his first term, on top of his Latin and Greek authors. ‘Of course there is very little time for ordinary reading, which has to be confined to the week-end as it was at Kirk’s.’³

They were happy days, spent basking in the pleasures of peacetime, the beauty of the college buildings and, as spring turned into summer, the beauty of Oxford itself.

‘It is perfectly lovely now both in town and country – there are such masses of fruit trees all white,’ he wrote in June 1919.

One big cherry tree stands in the Master’s garden just below my windows and a brisk wind this morning has shaken down masses of leaves that lay like snowflakes on the bright smooth grass. Then beyond the lawn you see the gable end of the chapel. I usually go and bathe before breakfast now at a very nice place up the Cherwell called ‘Parsons Pleasure’. I always swim (on chest) down to a bend, straight towards the sun, see some hills in the distance across the water, then turn and come again to land going on my back and looking up at the willow trees above me.⁴

As if the pleasures of mind and sense were not enough, he was also expanding his circle of friendship. Eric Dodds, his fellow-Irishman, destined one day to succeed Gilbert Murray as Regius Professor of Greek, was Lewis’s exact contemporary at Univ. They differed radically over the Irish question – Dodds being a fanatical Home Ruler who refused to stand up for the National Anthem; but they liked each other and were stimulated by each other’s company. A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, later to be known as an authority on Cornwall, was another friend made at this juncture. ‘I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment, in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most wet and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge.’ Another friend met in his first year of residence at Univ was Owen Barfield, an undergraduate at Wadham College. The First Friend, Lewis believed, is like Arthur Greeves, the man who becomes an alter ego and who shares your tastes. ‘But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything.’⁵ Lewis was to say that Barfield changed him a good deal more than he did Barfield, and this was probably true. The thing they disagreed about most forcefully was religion, Barfield being set on the course which was to lead him to embrace theosophy, and Lewis at this stage still being an ardent atheist.

Lewis appeared to be enjoying an archetypal undergraduate career in ancient and beautiful surroundings. But in fact his routines were completely different from those of his fellow-collegians. True, he rose at six-thirty, bathed, attended chapel (which was still compulsory for undergraduates) and had his breakfast in hall. Then he went to lectures and libraries and tutorials, and had lunch (bread, cheese and beer) brought over to his room by a college servant. But at 1 p.m. without fail, he got on his bicycle and pedalled over Magdalen Bridge, up Headington Hill and into the dingy little suburban thoroughfare near the mental hospital. There at Number 28 Warneford Road, in the house of a lady of High Church persuasion by the name of Featherstone, Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen had taken up their abode. ‘They are installed in our “own hired house” (like St. Paul only not daily preaching and teaching). The owner of the house has not yet cleared out and we pay a little less than the whole for her still having a room.’⁶

It is the ‘we’ in this paragraph from a letter to Arthur Greeves which must give the reader pause. Lewis is now twenty years old, and dependent (in those days before university grants) on an allowance from his father. This allowance was meant to cover the expenses of one young man living in college. Instead, it was made to stretch (in those months when cheques were not forthcoming from the Beast) to pay the rent for Mrs Moore and her daughter. Here was a commitment indeed.

Nor was it merely a financial one. From the very beginning of his relationship with Janie Moore, Lewis involved himself in all her domestic arrangements – the cleaning, the cooking, the shopping, as well as the schoolwork of the little girl. ‘He’s as good as an extra maid,’⁷ Mrs Moore once said of him. Moreover, because the arrangement was so makeshift, there was no permanence in any of the domestic arrangements which they made. They lived from hand to mouth. Between 1918 and 1923 they had nine different addresses, traipsing disconsolately from one set of rented rooms to the next, and always finding something wrong when they got there. Some places objected to Maureen’s noisy music practice. Some were by their nature temporary. In others doubts were cast on the relationship between Mrs Moore and her ‘adopted son’ and they moved on to avoid scandal.

For all this domestic life of Lewis’s in his undergraduate days had to remain a closely guarded secret. Nowadays, nearly all the colleges in Oxford are open to both sexes, and no disgrace attaches to the two sexes consorting together. Things were very different until at least 1960. In 1919, the older dons could just about remember the days when college fellows had to be celibate. Even though marriage was now permitted them, an atmosphere of celibacy prevailed. Scholars of colleges were under an obligation of celibacy. Nor was this entirely a formality. Failure to attend breakfast in your college could result in being ‘gated’, that is confined to the college for a period of anything from a week to a term. To have slept out of college was a very serious offence. To be shown to have associated with a member of the opposite sex was yet more serious. Six years after Lewis began his career at Univ, another poet whose first volume had been published before he arrived at Oxford was rusticated – sent away for a term – because of his association with a married woman in Maidenhead.’ “I hope, Mr. Quennell, you do not know as much about Mrs. X as we do,” remarked the Vice Chancellor with a gently dismissive sigh … The Oxford I knew was still a semi-monastic institution; some of the dons clearly detested women; and the only kind of moral offence they condoned were discreetly managed homosexual passions.’⁸

If Lewis’s domestic arrangements had been known to the college authorities or to the Vice-Chancellor of the University, there is no doubt at all that they would have been considered most irregular. True, there had been oddities before in the history’ of the University. John Ruskin’s mother had taken up residence in the High Street when he was an undergraduate at Christ Church. Robert Hawker, the future vicar of Morwenstowe and author of ‘And Shall Trelawney Die’, had arrived to be an undergraduate as a married man (as it happened to a woman twenty years his senior). But Mrs Moore was neither Lewis’s wife nor his mother, and though she may have been something just as innocent, it would have put his entire career in jeopardy had the authorities known about her. He would certainly never have had any hope of a college fellowship; even in the 1950s, Oxford dons who were deemed to have led irregular lives with the opposite sex found themselves ‘resigning’ their fellowships.

They were jealous of their time together. In early days, there was a significant little quarrel between Maureen Moore, her mother and Lewis. An unshakable part of the Sunday routine was that Maureen should be sent out to church in the morning, leaving her mother and Lewis for a precious hour together on their own. She did not much enjoy going and had from the first resented her mother’s being prepared to allow life to revolve around Jack. Maureen’s life had never been stable, but since Lewis had come on the scene, what stability it once possessed had been lost for ever. Since 1919, she had been moved from school to school, and from lodging house to lodging house: Bristol, Eastbourne, London, Oxford. Her mother was prepared to take her anywhere, so long as she could be near Jack.

One week, she decided to rebel against the church routine. Why should she always go to church alone? Her mother and Jack never went to church. She refused to go. Their reaction was vehement. She must go out and leave them alone. Unwillingly, furiously, she went. In later years, when Lewis himself had become a regular churchgoer, Maureen wistfully looked back on this apparent over-reaction and wondered if it was the beginning of his return to the practice of Christianity. As a child, it did not occur to her to ask why a young man might wish sometimes to be left alone with her mother.⁹

In addition to what Maureen, or Oxford, might make of the relationship between Lewis and Mrs Moore, there was the question of what Belfast would make of it. Although Lewis did his best to conceal from his father the full extent of his involvement with Mrs Moore, Albert was no fool; and as a police-court solicitor he naturally viewed the thing in a lurid light.

‘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,’ he wrote to Warnie. ‘Then there is the husband who I have always been told is a scoundrel – but the absent are always to blame – somewhere in the background, who some of these days might try a little aimiable [sic] blackmailing.’¹⁰ Warnie, when he got this letter, was ‘greatly relieved to hear that Mrs. Moore HAS a husband’. He made two sound points in reply to his father’s fears. ‘(1) Mrs. Moore can’t marry Jacks (2) Mr. Moore can’t blackmail him because “IT” hasn’t enough money to make it a paying risk.’¹¹

Jack, for his part, felt an intense awkwardness about the fact that he had, in effect, cut loose from home and thrown in his lot with Mrs Moore and Maureen. Guilt made him hostile, and the more conscious he became that his father disapproved of the Mrs Moore set-up, the more venomous his hostility became. ‘Haven’t heard from my esteemed parent for some time; has he committed suicide yet?’ he asked Greeves in one letter of June 1919, and in July he wrote, ‘I hope you are avoiding my father as much as possible.’¹²

As the summer term at University College came to an end, the question had naturally arisen of where, and with whom, Jack would spend the Long Vacation (from June until October). He wanted to be with Mrs Moore, but could not admit the extent of his involvement with her. Why could he not come to Ireland as usual? was the cunning request of both Albert and Warnie, neither of whom liked the sound of Mrs Moore at all. Jack parried, ‘Where could you pass your holiday better than in Oxford? The three of us could certainly spend our afternoons in a punt under the willows at least as comfortably as we did at Dunbar and the Mitre, honoured with so many famous ghosts, would be an improvement on the Railway Hotel.’¹³

He felt torn. He both did, and did not, want to admit to himself that the childhood days at Little Lea had come to an end. In the event the vacation was a compromise, with Jack moving to and fro between his two homes, trying in each to pretend that the other did not exist. At the end of July, he and Warnie made a visit to Gastons to see the Kirkpatricks, and on their way back stayed in London to see a show – The Maid of the Mountains, with Bertram Wallis and José Collins. They then went back to Ireland together. In spite of various happy outings with their mother’s relations, the Ewarts and the Hamiltons (and a jaunt to Island Magee), the atmosphere at home was tense. A major quarrel developed between Jack and his father, and by the end of August Jack had returned to Oxford to reside in ‘lodgings’ – Uplands, Windmill Road, Headington – with Mrs Moore and Maureen. The quarrel rumbled on by letter throughout the late summer and early autumn. ‘I must ask you’, Jack implored, ‘to believe that it would have been easier for me to have left those things unsaid. They were as painful to me as they were to you.’¹⁴

It would be fascinating to know from Jack’s tutors at University College how much any of these tensions were reflected either in his work or in his general demeanour during tutorials and at college meals. But no such record survives. All we know is that by the spring of 1920 he was ready to sit Honour Moderations, and to be placed very surely in the First Class. ‘I was very sorry to hear that I had allowed you first to learn the news about Mods from a stranger,’ he wrote home to his father. ‘I had put off writing until I was clear of Oxford.’¹⁵

This letter, like nearly all the letters he wrote to his father at this period, reflects an agony of guilt about their quarrel and separation. The guilt was something which he was never, quite, able to expunge. He always regarded this spell of angry estrangement from Albert as ‘the blackest chapter of my life’.¹⁶

‘Clear of Oxford’ in that last letter meant that he was enjoying a walking holiday in Somerset ‘with a friend’. The friend, of course, was Mrs Moore. By the end of his next term, when he had started to study ancient history and philosophy for Greats, Lewis was completely wrapped up in a happy combination of academic work and domestic absorption in Mrs Moore’s doings and affairs. Ireland, which was in the grip of a civil war which threatened to destroy the entire Protestant population, seemed remote during the happy Oxford summer of 1920. ‘I cannot understand the Irish news at all,’ he wrote airily.¹⁷ This was the period when he came closest to an estrangement not only from the P’daytabird, but also from his beloved brother Warnie. Snatching a bit of leave from the Army, Warnie arrived in Oxford and was surprised to read, ‘I am afraid this is rather an unfortunate day for you to come up as I am taking a child’ (Maureen, of course) ‘to a matinee and shall not therefore be able to see you until rather late.’ This from his closest companion and friend. No feeling of apology accompanied this note, left at Warnie’s hotel, because by now Jack took it for granted that Mrs Moore and her family took precedence over everything. He added insult to injury by saying ‘another time if possible you should warn me for duty earlier.’ Seeing his brother had become a ‘duty’.¹⁸

Warnie was nevertheless insistent about keeping open lines of communication with Jack, and in September 1920 he made Jack come on holiday with him to Ulster. Dreadful rows took place during this time between Jack and his father. When the boy had gone back to Oxford his father licked his wounds in the pages of his diary.

I still think I was very badly – not to say insultingly and contemptuously treated by Jacks. It is questionable whether I did a wise thing in submitting as I did, but it would have made me miserable for the rest of my life to have had an open rupture and forbidden him the house. But such weakness with some natures is traded upon and made to justify further insult and disrespect.¹⁹

There can be little doubt, once he lost control and tempers flared, that Jack Lewis could take a delight in tormenting his victim. One of his more sinister dreams, recorded at about this period, was of Mrs Moore and himself in a street off the Cowley Road, one of the poorer, slummier streets in East Oxford.

We each had a man wrapped in sacking and helmeted with a biscuit tin, and we are throwing them up in the air to kill them with the fall. When that failed it became one man whom we succeeded in murdering (I am not sure how. I think by drumming his head on the pavement) and the rest of the dream consists of fearful anxiety lest we should be discovered.²⁰

Thanks to Warnie, some semblance of a relationship between Albert and Jack was maintained. Jack went home, for example, for Christmas 1920, and accompanied his brother to church; and a flow of dutiful letters were sent back to Little Lea from Oxford.

Against this troubled emotional background, Lewis continued to read the ancient historians and the philosophers, and to see friends such as Barfield. The subject which now interested him most was philosophy; it appealed to that side of his nature which was born of the police-court solicitor and nourished at the feet of the Great Knock: the side which liked to argue, to dispute, to analyse, to indulge in intellectual cut and thrust. He began to nurse ambitions that he would become a professional philosopher and a fellow of one of the colleges. Meanwhile the side of his nature which read George MacDonald and W. B. Yeats, which saw visions and dreamed dreams, poured itself out in poetry, and he began to execute a large mythical work entitled Dymer.

His academic prowess showed no signs of waning. In the spring of 1921, he wrote an essay on Optimism, which was awarded the Chancellor’s English Essay Prize and declaimed before the assembled University grandees, Doctors, Professors and Heads of House, at the annual Encaenia in June. While he was writing the essay, he also had two memorable encounters with one of his heroes, W. B. Yeats, who had taken up residence at 4 Broad Street, Oxford.

The meetings with Yeats made a deep impression and he wrote them up for the benefit of both Arthur Greeves and his own father. He was struck by the rare, bogus-mystical ambience which the poet, then aged about sixty, had constructed around himself. Visitors were shown up a narrow staircase, lined with pictures by Blake – mainly illustrations to the Book of Job and Paradise Lost. There they found a room whose flame-coloured curtains were drawn shut, and whose only form of light derived from large, flickering six-foot candles of the kind normally seen on a church altar. Mrs Yeats reclined on a sofa, while the visitors sat around on hard upright chairs and listened to the oracular figure of Yeats himself, huge, fat, and with an affected voice which sounded almost as much French as it did Irish.²¹ ‘I understood the Dr. Johnson atmosphere for the first time – it was just like that, you know, we all sitting round, putting in judicious questions while the great man played with some old seals on his watch chain and talked.’²²

On Lewis’s first visit the talk, highly uncongenial to the young atheist visitor, was all of magic and apparitions. The Jesuit Master of Campion Hall, Father Martindale, SJ, provided a skeletal presence in the flickering candlelight while Yeats prosed about the Hermetic books, lunar meditations, and the practice of magic which he said he had learnt from Bergson’s sister. It amazed Lewis the rationalist that intelligent people could be sitting about in a circle in Oxford and talking of the supernatural as if it were soberly true, and the incident was to have a deep effect on his imagination. Twenty years later, Lewis himself was to be the centre of just such a circle, discussing spirits and spiritualities with Charles Williams. Now Yeats was immediately transformed into the magician in Lewis’s own poem Dymer, and many years later Lewis drew on Yeats when he was describing the bulky mysterious figure of Merlin, the morally ambivalent wizard-ruffian of That Hideous Strength. ‘It is a pity’, Jack wrote to his father, ‘that the real romance of meeting a man who has written great poetry and who has known William Morris and Tagore and Symonds should be so overlaid with the sham romance of flame-coloured curtains and mumbo-jumbo.’²³

Silliness, sham and mumbo-jumbo have never been absent from the Oxford scene. Only a few yards down the street from Yeats’s house, the Reverend Montague Summers was writing his great book about vampires (of which he claimed to have first-hand knowledge). Lewis would not have been able to echo W. H. Auden’s view of Yeats: ‘you were silly like us’. Lewis’s generation, the men who came straight back from the trenches to pursue their studies at the University, were too relieved to be alive, and too emotionally shocked, to be able to indulge in the wild, liberating silliness either of their elders, like Yeats, or of the younger generation who were about to appear in Oxford – the heroically silly generation of Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh and the Hypocrites Club. Lewis’s undergraduate life, even without the presence of Mrs Moore, was prosaic, almost suburban. Those who do not have the sound of exploding shells still echoing in their dreams, and the memory of decaying young corpses forever present in their memories, might well be inclined to impatience with Lewis’s cult of the ordinary. It was at this period, in some dingy room in Headington, that he laid down his book and wrote a poem which, though indefensible from an aesthetic point of view, was unquestionably written from the heart:

Thank God that there are solid folk

Who water flowers and roll the lawn

And sit and sew and talk and smoke

And snore through all the summer dawn …

Oh happy people, I have seen

No verse yet written in your praise,

And truth to tell, the time has been

I would have scorned your easy ways.

But now through weariness and strife

I learn your worthiness indeed,

The world is better for such life

As stout, suburban people lead.

The tragedy of Albert Lewis’s life was that his son had to learn this lesson not in his own suburban house at Strandtown, but in rented accommodation with his ‘adopted mother’. It has become customary for those who write about Lewis to speak of his fondness for Mrs Moore and the domestic routines in which she involved him as a tyranny which he endured with a martyr’s patience. Almost any domestic routine which involves more than one person can be viewed in this light; and it is unquestionable that Mrs Moore was a demanding companion whose desire for Lewis to be involved in the smallest detail of her life did not diminish with the years. But though she may have given him more than he bargained for, it would be unfair to her memory to deny that she was providing something which he very much needed and wanted.

Mrs Moore was demanding, but she was also generous. Much of the shopping and fetching was only necessary because she wanted to entertain and to give people meals. She was naturally gregarious. Children and animals loved her. She was spontaneously affectionate – witness the occasion when she was asked to do jury service at the Oxford Crown Court and was upbraided by the court officials for being found sitting outside in the corridor with her arm around the defendant, comforting him in his nervous sorrow. She asked much, but she also gave much. She was entirely lacking in English ‘reserve’. If one wants to know what she meant to the young Lewis one should not read only the accounts of her written by Warnie when he was a jealous, crusty bachelor and she had grown into a querulous old woman. One should read the vision in The Great Divorce of a Great Lady surrounded by a procession of angels, children and animals.

‘Who are all these young men and women on each side?’

‘They are her sons and daughters.’

‘She must have had a very large family, sir.’

‘Every young man or boy that met her became her son – even if it was only the boy that brought the meat to her back door. Every girl that met her was her daughter.’

‘Isn’t that a bit hard on their own parents?’

‘No. There are those that steal other people’s children. But her motherhood was of a different kind … Few men looked on her without becoming in a certain fashion her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true but truer to their own wives.’

‘And how … but hullo! What are all those animals? A cat, two cats – dozens of cats. And all those dogs … why, I can’t count them. And the birds. And the horses.’

‘They are her beasts.’

‘Did she keep a sort of zoo? I mean, this is a bit too much.’