Narnia's Lost Poet: The Secret Lives and Loves of C. S. Lewis | Real Love

An enormous crowd gathers in Westminster Abbey to mark the addition of a new name to those of the dramatists and scribes remembered in Poets' Corner. Among our great national poets, Chaucer, Spencer, Shakespeare, they are commemorating a man who was very well known for his prose, not so well known for writing verse. C.S. Lewis wasn't a great poet, but his prose guarantees him immortality. People think of C.S. Lewis as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia, but the Narnia tales were only the smallest fraction of a vast literary output. Lewis was an atheist who became a zealous Christian who dedicated himself to explaining a rational basis for the faith. His theological books and broadcasts made him one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern age. But theology wasn't his real job. Lewis was, in fact, a scholar of medieval literature and a great teacher. Twenty years ago, I wrote a biography of Clive Staples Lewis. And I suppose what fascinated me about him was he was a man of contrasts. He lived through the first part of the 20th century, but he hated the modern age. He was a popular theologian, but he had a great crisis of faith. He was an extremely clever person, but a total incompetent. He failed the driving test 17 times. He ended his days as a university professor, but he was always a man who, at key moments, was ruled not by his head, but by his heart. Lewis wrote over 60 books and essays for adults, but is best remembered for the seven stories he wrote for children. It's said that C.S. Lewis's Narnia stories have sold over 100 million copies. And for those many fans, he is a hero. The chief characters of the stories are children, and the formative influence, his own childhood. But was that a happy childhood? Absolutely not. C.S. Lewis was born in 1898. His parents were surprisingly liberal for their time. He grew up surrounded by books on all subjects with no limit to what he could read. Lewis would make his life and his fame in the most English of surroundings. But he was, in fact, an Ulster man from Belfast. This is the Little Lee, the house which Albert Lewis, a prosperous Belfast solicitor, had built for his family, and it's the scene of all C.S. Lewis's earliest childhood imaginative experiences. At the end of an upstairs corridor, in what they called the Little End Room, Clive, known as Jack, and his brother Warren, known as Warney, created a fantasy world. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Jack Lewis recalls a moth-and-twig diorama forest that Warney made for him on a biscuit tin lid. The first sight of it awakened an obsession with the natural world, but a hyper-real version of it. Magical, surreal, mythic, something more pungent than the real thing. He called it Paradise, the first beauty he ever knew. This was the beginning of Lewis's sense of longing, an elation felt and immediately lost, like fragrance. He described it as an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. In German, they call it Sehnsucht. It was a rapture he experienced when reading the poet Longfellow, on seeing a flowering bush in the garden, and, most significantly, when reading of the bushy-tailed superhero, Squirrel Nutkin. Like most children of his generation, Lewis had read stories about talking animals, the madmarch hare in Lewis Carroll, or the clothed creatures in Beatrix Potter. So it's hardly surprising, when he started to invent his own stories as a child, his invented world, Boxen, was a place full of talking animals. Jack and Warnie were happy in their imaginative worlds, but their joy was short-lived. In 1908, when Jack was only nine, their mother, Flora, died from cancer. Poor little Jack, tormented by toothache, called out for his mother in the dark, and she didn't come. And he couldn't understand why she didn't come. And he called again. And his father came to him in tears and broke the news. It was always devastating to Lewis that he'd never had the chance to say goodbye to his mother. Before the death, there was the happy golden childhood in Northern Ireland. After it, there was the dark. He later wrote, it was all sea and islands now. The great continent had sunk, like Atlantis. The most recent biographer of C.S. Lewis is Alistair McGrath. He vividly captures the child who would become the great man. The death of Flora Lewis really brought that idyllic period to an end. It meant that Lewis had lost the lodestar of his life, I think. It's very clear that Lewis saw his mother as a figure of stability. His father's decision to send Lewis away to boarding school in England immediately after his mother's death, it may have been well-intentioned, but it was a mistake. And that, I think, led to alienation between Lewis and his father, but also, I think, led Lewis to really feel lonely, isolated and wondering what on earth things were all about. How could he reconnect with a lost family life? Being sent to school in England so soon after Flora's death was something the nine-year-old Lewis felt acutely. He never forgot the horrible experience of sitting on the boat going over to England for the first time and hearing the English voices. They made him feel an alien. And although he spent all his grown-up life in England, he never quite lost that sense, that sense of alienation, which went as his strong imagination developed, with this romantic feeling of yearning and longing for something that was forever lost. Lewis hated his English schools. He later described his experiences as worse than life in the trenches. In his utter misery, he retreated into a world of fantasy. And it was at his English boarding school in 1911 that he made two key discoveries in his emotional and aesthetic journey. The sight of the mythic creatures in Arthur Rackham's illustration for Wagner's Ring Cycle stirred romantic urges in Lewis. And when hearing Wagner's music of Siegfried and the twilight of the gods itself, he was transported to what he describes as pure northernness, a vision of huge, clear spaces hanging above the Atlantic in the endless twilight. Lewis was a sensitive youth appalled by the brutality of public school. He loathed athleticism. He couldn't catch a ball or wield a bat. He used to say his whole life would have been different if he'd had different thumbs. He had these weird thumbs he'd inherited from his father that there was no joint in his thumb. He could wield a pen all right and always used a dip pen. Luckily for him, his education was about to pass into the hands of a man who cared not one jot about sporting prowess. William Kirkpatrick was a patrician classicist from Northern Ireland who taught Lewis's father. On realising Jack's unhappiness at boarding school, Albert Lewis decided to send his son to Kirkpatrick. And it was Kirkpatrick who finished, or perhaps started, Jack Lewis's education at his home in the leafy Surrey village of Great Bookham. Kirkpatrick was waiting to meet the train and the shy Lewis happened to remark that he was surprised to find the countryside of Surrey so wild. Stop, said Kirkpatrick. What do you mean by wild? And why should you have a presupposition about the nature of a countryside you've never seen in your life? Over three years, Kirkpatrick re-engineered Lewis intellectually, making him a hardened dialectician, logician and orator. By 18 years old, Lewis read the classics in the original languages and could retain them all. And there was another transformation. The Ulster Protestant boy had turned into an Ulster Protestant atheist, like Kirkpatrick himself. At 17 years old, Lewis no longer believed in heaven, but he was about to step into an earthly hell. Europe was in the throes of war, and although Lewis won a place at Oxford to read classics in 1917, he almost immediately volunteered for active service and was sent here to Keeble College, which had been requisitioned for officer training. The cadets were arranged alphabetically in the dormitory, and in the next-door bed was Paddy Moore, a young Irish boy, very charming, with whom Lewis formed a friendship. With their imminent departure to the front line, Jack and Paddy made a pact. If one of them didn't come back, they'd care for the parents of the other. Jack's father, Albert Lewis, or Paddy's mother, Janie Moore. Paddy was sent to France in October 1917, and Jack arrived a month later on his 19th birthday. In writing about C.S. Lewis, I was interested in the psychological turning points that made him and perplexed that the First World War didn't seem to have been one of them. He experienced the horror of trench warfare, took prisoner a whole German platoon and was wounded by shrapnel that killed comrades standing next to him. Fellow combatants, like Sassoon, Graves and Rupert Brooke, were inspired to write great poetry. Lewis also wrote verse in the trenches, but the collection, Spirits in Bondage, was unremarkable. He seems not to have been much moved by the horror of it all. He described the experience as unimportant. Was he in denial? Insurprised by joy, Lewis uses a very interesting phrase, a treaty with reality. What he means by that is, in effect, there is a far war he's constructed which keeps unsettling thoughts firmly on its other side. My own feeling is that the reason he does this is he found it so traumatic that he even finds remembering it very, very difficult. The war would, in fact, be a turning point for Jack Lewis, not creatively but emotionally. Through his friendship with Paddy Moore, he met the woman with whom he'd spend most of his life. On 24th March 1918, Paddy was indeed killed in action and Jack kept his part of the bargain to look after Paddy's mother. With peace came a return to University College Oxford. He had rooms in college, but he was living in the suburbs with Mrs Moore. He was 20, she was 46. Today, the C.S. Lewis industry includes tourism. Guide Peter Cousin is familiar with the succession of cheap lodging houses around Oxford where Lewis and Mrs Moore, or Minto as he called her, lived between 1919 and 1930. We're going to view the first accommodation where Mrs Moore and Lewis had room. Oh, yes, look, Anstey Villa. It's quite a modest house. Yes, it would be a two- or three-bedroom. It was much more modest than the house that Lewis was brought up in. Oh, yes, they still had old gaslight and it definitely wouldn't have had any central heating. It's very touching to think of them there, isn't it, Peter? It is, actually, yes. All the letters that Lewis wrote to his father, Albert, have always got a college address. He's trying to hide this relationship with Mrs Moore. Lewis kept secret his relationship with Minto, not just because he was adept at compartmentalising emotional matters. There were practical reasons for the subterfuge. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he was meant to be living in his college. It's hard for us to imagine just how strict Oxford was in those days. I had an old friend who was a few years younger than Lewis who was sacked in the 1920s from the university for spending one night with a woman in Reading. Lewis was living with Mrs Moore and he had to keep the relationship secret too from his father, that his father was financing not just one student, but a family of three. Not only was the 20-year-old Lewis caring for Minto, but also for her daughter Maureen. He called Minto Mother and became a de facto stepfather to Maureen, who was only eight years his junior. There was clearly some sort of relationship between Lewis and Mrs Moore which mingled maternal affection and romantic love. And while I don't think we really understand that relationship completely, Mrs Moore in effect brought Lewis the stability, the affection, the family context that Lewis felt he was missing, partly through the death of his mother, but also through the increasing alienation that was building up between himself and his father. And living with a woman was a very dangerous thing to do. What Lewis did in effect was present Mrs Moore as his landlady. The reason why I'm spending time in her house is that I'm renting a room from her. And then as things got more complex, he presented Mrs Moore as his mother. Kirkpatrick's training paid off and by 1923, Lewis had a first in classics to his name with another first in English literature for good measure. He was increasingly steeping himself in his childhood love of Norse mythology and everything medieval. And it was with a fellow medievalist, J.R.R. Tolkien, that Lewis formed a fellowship called the Inklings. They were a handful of chaps who shared an interest in academic debate, erudition and alcohol. The Eagle and Child pub, always known as the Bird and Baby, was their Oxford drinking den. Lewis and cronies used to assemble here on Tuesdays between 12 and 1. The general idea was to down as much beer as possible before they ate lunch in their colleges. Lewis had no small talk. One of the friends once arrived with his broken arm in a sling. Lewis didn't say, Oh, poor you, you've broken your arm. It was straight into, What does anybody here think of the Venerable Bede? I've been rereading him awfully good stuff. Dyson, the loudest member of the group, once said to me, Anyone hearing us roar would assume we were talking bawdry. In fact, we were discussing literature and theology. Lewis not only read the great poets, he'd always dreamed of becoming one. He tried his hand at war poetry unsuccessfully. And in 1926, he tried again with what he hoped would be his great work. Dimer is a long, rambling narrative poem about the citizen of a totalitarian state who wanders into a forest. And there he meets a beautiful woman. Only it turns out she isn't a woman. She's really a monster. Dimer and the woman monster have congress. And she gives birth to a son. And when he grows up, he fights Dimer and kills him. How do I know? Not, unfortunately, because I've ever got to the end. When I wrote my own book about Lewis, I found his prose, whatever subject he addressed, electrifyingly readable. But his poetry? Oh, dear, oh, dear, oh, dear. And Dimer, I'm afraid, defeated me. Poor old Lewis. It took him 10 years to write. And when it was published, it was such a flop. And ever afterwards, he felt so resentful of the success and fame of his contemporary poets. Lewis was, however, a great success as a medieval scholar. His academic passion had paid off. And in 1925, he had been appointed a fellow of Magdalen College, teaching English literature. The position came with a salary of £500 a year, rooms and dining. C.S. Lewis spent hours of his life in this wonderful place, Duke Humphreys Library, reading and reading and reading. Primary texts. The great texts of English literature. Spencer, Shakespeare, Milton. That was the stuff that interested him. We tend to take it for granted that English literature is one of the main subjects studied in universities. But this was not the case when Lewis first got his job at Oxford. Indeed, there were many of the all-male colleges that didn't teach English at all. They thought of it as a girl's subject. Now, Tolkien and Lewis were very much of the opinion that English literature should have a sound, scholarly and, above all, historical base. Laura Ash, fellow of Worcester College, Oxford, is a medievalist with an appreciation of the Irishman's contribution to the field. I think people forget how young English literature is as a subject. I mean, Lewis, of course, just picked it up in a year after he'd done the real subject of classics. And this was a time when people were staking out the ground. What's the point? Is this a technical subject or is it a subject that's about grand ideas of culture and the human? And I think that's very clearly Lewis's approach. It's exhilarating reading his work. When you read something like The Allegory of Love, written in 1936, what he does is draw us into seeing the world in a new way. He says, my own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through the eyes of others. And reality is not enough for me. I will see what other men have invented. So what was it like having C.S. Lewis as your tutor? What was it like being taught by him in his rooms just above me here in New Building's Magdalen College? His nickname was Heavy Lewis, and he could be a bit heavy. One of his pupils once said he couldn't see the point of Matthew Arnold's Sorab and Rustom, a great epic poem. Lewis was so appalled that he reached for his old regimental sword, which was lying in the corner of the room, and said, the sword must settle this. But it wasn't all confrontation. When he first encountered his tutor, actor-to-be Robert Hardy was in uniform, as he was when we met. Robert, I notice you're wearing a Magdalen College tie. Yes, I put it on for the occasion. That was presumably where you met C.S. Lewis. Yes, absolutely. I vividly remember going through the Porter's Lodge and there on the lawn, coming towards me, I saw a man. I thought, oh, it's a gardener. But he had a tie on, so I thought, oh, he's a head gardener. And then immediately behind me as he passed, he said, are you Hardy? And I admitted. And he said, oh, well, there now, it's 11 o'clock and I'm going to be five minutes late. I'm Lewis, by the way. And I couldn't believe it. I was absolutely staggered at his appearance. From reading all the stuff that my tutor at school told me to read, I got a picture of Lewis. He was a sort of El Greco, Jesuit, thin, insistent, you know, and rather frightening. Probably pale and intense. Pale and intense, absolutely. But my goodness me, there was this jolly farmer. And I was absolutely in my element because I'm a country bumpkin, so I've adored him ever after. Did he entertain his pupils? Oh, yes, he did. He gave wonderfully jolly and extraordinary parties with lots of boos. I remember being hopelessly behind with an essay. And I said, oh, Mr Lewis, I wonder, would it be possible? I'm supposed to be reading my essay too tomorrow, but I haven't quite finished it. I wonder if I could come on Thursday? And he said, no, no, no. Don't bother about it for a second. Come next Wednesday at the usual time with an extra-specially good essay. Because the great thing about being at university is to enjoy yourself, which I hope you are. And besides, look at you in uniform. You'll be off soon and you may well get killed. It's proper that you enjoy yourself. Which I thought was so wonderful. Lewis was only a little older than his pupils, but to those he took to, he seems to have been fatherly. His relations with his own father, however, were more difficult. In 1929, Albert Lewis was taken ill. His son was at an emotional crossroads. Lewis came home to Belfast to see his father. He and Albert had barely been in contact for a decade, even though his father had supported him through his career. Lewis regarded his treatment of his father as the greatest sin of his life. But they were reconciled. When he realised that Albert Lewis was dying, Jack came back to East Belfast, and they had six golden weeks together in which the two men forged a friendship. Sadly, the Oxford term was about to begin and Lewis left. Four days later, after waving goodbye to his son, Albert Lewis died. Lewis returned here for his father's funeral. And left this window behind me as a memorial to his parents. His father was, for Lewis, a symbol of a lost childhood. It wasn't so much his father he liked, it was much more what his father represented. I think one of the most moving parts of Lewis's correspondence is a description of how, after his father's death, he and his brother bury all their childhood toys in the ground of Little Lee, almost saying, let's get closure on this, this is the end of childhood. The Lewis boys drew a line and moved on. Or did they? Jack Lewis had replaced his dead mother with a mother substitute in Minto. Albert's passing coincided with what might be seen as a process of finding a replacement father figure. Lewis had gone to the Western Front, a devout atheist, and returned with his convictions hardened. It was to be a slow process, but at 30, he began to change. In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed. Perhaps that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. Lewis started to attend his college chapel here. This is his stall as a fellow of the college. But, of course, at this stage, he still simply believed in God. He hadn't advanced to the position of believing in Jesus Christ. He had not yet completed his journey. Lewis had been a modern man, someone who believed in the modern materialist philosophy that the world is all there is, that we live in a world of matter and matter alone. Yet he hated being modern. He felt as though he'd been imprisoned. And this is how he describes it in his autobiography. The odd thing was that before God closed in on me, I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. I became aware I was holding something at bay or shutting something out, or if you like, I was wearing some stiff clothing like corsets or even a suit of armour, as if I were a lobster. He felt he was being given the choice either to keep this suit of armour on or to discard it. He made the choice to discard the carapace of modern materialism. This rather weird experience, this liberation of Lewis's imagination, occurred on the bus going home from Magdalen after a day's work to Heddington and Mrs Moore. Lewis, the great medievalist and lover of ancient mythology, could see the attraction of Christianity, but he could not yet believe it until one very significant conversation with his close friend J.R.R. Tolkien. On the night of the 19th of September, 1931, they were here with another friend, Hugo Dyson, on Addison's Walk in Magdalen College. And as they walked, Dyson and Tolkien talked to Lewis about religion. They talked about myth. How could it be, Lewis said, that there are so many myths in the old world, in Egypt, in Greece, in the Nordic mythologies, of a young man-god dying and coming back to life, of Baldra in the Nordic mythology, of Adonis in Greece? How do you distinguish between that and Jesus Christ in the Gospels, who surely is a mythological figure who dies in order to rise and save us from our sins? Isn't that just a myth too? Yes, said Tolkien, of course Christianity is a myth. It just happens to be the one myth which is true. Tolkien in particular was able to show Lewis that Christianity was a story, a sense-making story that grasped the imagination. But this one was right, and if this one was right, it positioned all other myths. And Lewis suddenly realised this was the missing link. This enabled him to see why Christianity and literature connected up with each other. Lewis's central problem, how could the Christian myth be the only true one, was dealt with. All religions glimpse the wonder of God, but Christianity is the big picture. The moment of enlightenment happened not on the road to Damascus, but on the B489 to Dunstable. They were having a family outing to Whipsnade Zoo. Maureen, Minto, Warnie and Jack. Lewis tells us that when they set out on that journey, he didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God. By the time they'd arrived at Whipsnade, he did. Still committed to life at home looking after Minto and Maureen, Lewis was now a full convert to Christianity. He saw it his duty to explain his new faith and began to write as a Christian apologist. The screw-tape letters about human temptation describe how one senior devil instructs a junior devil, and the problem of pain written in 1940 tries to explain how a loving God can allow us to suffer. In summer 1940, France fell, and in September, the aerial bombardment of Britain's population began. Lewis's writings chimed with hard times and his apologetics were inspirational fireside reading. But radio was the medium of the age and the best means of broadcasting Lewis's words of comfort. At the beginning of the Second World War, the BBC asked Lewis to give broadcast talks a defence of the Christian religion. They had an immense effect. Many people regarded Lewis as the greatest broadcaster of the war. Many placed him above Churchill himself. In 1952, Lewis published a version of his wartime talks. The book has never been out of print. Mere Christianity is one of his most popular books. One of the great strengths of Lewis's wartime talks is the way in which he's able to use language which really resonates with his audience. He tells stories, he uses analogies, he speaks in a very accessible way. One person once described it as a port wine and plum pudding voice. There's an intellectual content to what Lewis is saying as well. It's not, here are very good reasons for believing in God. It's much more, look, if there were a God, doesn't it make a lot of sense of what we experience within us and observe around us? The wartime broadcasts made him a star at home and the publication in 1942 of The Screwtape Letters made him an American celebrity. By an irony, his ability to popularise theological ideas made him hated in the one place that really mattered to him, Oxford. Seen from the outside, at 44, Lewis was in his prime, but the Oxford academics weren't so impressed. What was an English don doing writing popular theology? Lewis was a spellbinding lecturer, so popular they found it difficult to get lecture halls large enough to accommodate his audiences. He was by far the most distinguished member of the Oxford English faculty, and yet when it came to getting professorships and promotion, he was always passed over. Why? Because the mean-spirited Oxford dons resented his popularity. Also, in post-war Oxford, Christianity was hated and Lewis was really a martyr for his faith, much to Oxford's shame. And when it came to finding relief, there wasn't so much at home either. Since 1930, Lewis and his brother had shared this house, the Kilns, with Minto and Maureen Moore. Today, the place is a shrine presided over by acolytes like Deborah Higgins. Welcome to the Kilns. Thank you very much indeed. Yes, come into the common room. Wonderful. This is where Lewis would have received you. It's also where Lewis did some writing. There was a desk under the window just like this one. There he is. Yes. He did have bookcases on either side of the fireplace. Lovely. He owned over 3,000 books himself. And then we also have the map here of Narnia. A lovely thing to have. Yes, it is. It's beautiful. This typewriter is our only original artefact from the two brothers and it's Major Warren Lewis's typewriter. It was on this very machine that he typed? Yes. He said in his diary he typed over 12,000 of Lewis's fan mail letters. Let's take a look upstairs. Certainly. There's three bedrooms. That was Maureen's room. This one, which was Mrs Moore's room. And then this one, which was C.S. Lewis's bedroom. So a very frugal room. They probably only had about two fires that were ever lit in the house. Yes, there's also a picture of him wearing a thick dressing gown. Yes. Well, in C.S. Lewis's letters, he writes someone and tells them that he reached out to get a cup of water and the water was frozen. Conditions were wintry all right. By the end of the war, Minto was 73 and her health was deteriorating. Warney, now an alcoholic, increasingly depended on Jack. Lewis's faith might have been holding him together at home, but his confidence was seriously shaken one February evening in 1948. The Socratic Society was a Christian debating club. C.S. Lewis often came to debate the philosophical implications of Christianity or how these religious ideas impacted on society at large. He must have looked forward to one of his debating evenings in which the cut and thrust of the famous Lewis was on display and his opponents were all over the floor. How wrong he was! Sir Anthony Kenny was a priest before he became a philosopher. He knew Lewis's debating opponent well, an immensely gifted scholar named Elizabeth Anstrom. As a philosopher, she would become legendary, as would her encounter with Lewis. Lewis had published a book called Miracles in which he maintained that if everything that we say and think is the result of purely mechanical processes in our brain, then there can't be any value, there can't be any truth. Nothing can be either true or false. And Anstrom refuted this with a rather simple argument. She said, suppose I stand on one of those weighing machines that say, I speak your weight, and it says to me, you weigh 15 stone, that is true even though it is produced by totally mechanical means. And this simple argument did really undercut Lewis's position. It's a paradox, isn't it? Because a lot of people saw it as a conflict between the Christian Lewis and this bright, sparkly young woman, but in fact she was fervently Christian as well. Yes, she was a very devout Roman Catholic. That was what particularly wounded Lewis. He felt they should have been allies fighting side by side in the battle against naturalism and secularism. And here he was, brought down by friendly fire. After the Anstrom debate, Lewis felt humiliated. I remember Dyson telling me as he'd come back to the pub, Lewis had put his head in his hands and said, I've been utterly crushed, I've been humiliated. And he wrote afterwards that he'd been obliterated as an apologist. And it's very striking that after that moment, Lewis wrote no more Christian apologetics aimed at converting unbelievers. He'd already written a highly successful space trilogy and he'd been dabbling with the idea of children's stories. But it's surely no accident that after his humiliation in a philosophical debate in Oxford, he turned to the world beyond the wardrobe. The four children in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe go to stay in the house of a Professor Kirk who bears more than a passing resemblance to Kirkpatrick, Lewis's old tutor. They find at the top of his house a magic wardrobe. When they pass through it, they've entered the land of Narnia. When the Professor discovers that they've had this experience, he's amazed that they haven't related it to reading the philosopher Plato. Plato, who believed that this world was but the shadow of a real world beyond. In another way, you could say, the Narnia stories were an enactment of that great conversation he had with Tolkien about a myth which happened to be true. This magical world of Narnia was a work of Lewis's imagination, but it's easy to see the influences of the landscape that Jack and Warnie grew up in, of northernness, thin light and remnants of a land beyond. Almost the first physical contact that Lewis had with the Middle Ages must have been in the ruined castles of Northern Ireland, where he had holidays with his mother, just up the bay from here, Dunluce Castle, which many people think is the model for Caer Paravell, the castle in Narnia. At the end of the Narnia stories, in the last battle, Caer Paravell is besieged, and it seems as though everything is lost and the children believe that the forces of good have been defeated. But they learn that everything they've loved in this life has actually been preserved for them, a very potent image by Lewis, a feeling that all his longings and all the things he's loved and lost in this life will in fact be kept and preserved. As with the buried childhood toys in the garden of Little Lea, Lewis clung on to the hope that the love he had for his lost mother would in some way be saved, unspoiled by separation. The Narnia chronicles come straight from the heart, and it is in these adventures we see most clearly the combination of Lewis the Christian and Lewis the medievalist. I think what he was doing with the whole world of Narnia was developing a world which makes symbolism true. Whether or not you think our real world is symbolic of a higher reality, it's very clear that Lewis's invented Narnian world is symbolic of some higher reality that he was reaching toward. I mean, when you have, for example, Aslan the lion giving up his life as he lies on the slab, it's a symbol of Christ's atoning sacrifice. Right, exactly. What we suddenly get is an access of really sharp medieval theology because we have Aslan explain, when he's resurrected, explain to the children that what he's done is play a trick on the evil queen whereby she has been tricked into sacrificing an innocent who had no guilt in the place of someone else who was guilty and therefore the magic is broken, death is overturned. Now, that is absolutely the theory of Christ's crucifixion in the Middle Ages. And there it is, set out in the middle of this children's book. Lewis had no children of his own. He'd started his relationship with Mrs Moore when he was 19 and she was 45. So even if they'd married, they'd hardly have had children. But she had children and she was a very motherly type and indeed adopted in an informal way quite a lot of children over the years. And when war came, this house, the kilns, filled up with evacuee children. Amongst them, a Londoner named June Fluitt, who in 1942 joined them as an evacuee. She would grow up to become actress Jill Raymond, then wife of MP Clement Freud. She adored Lewis's books. But at first, Jill had no idea who the tweedy owner of the kilns was. I'd been there two or three days when he arrived and I was in the kitchen and Mrs Moore said, oh, here's Jack. I was able to chat to him quite happily as a 16-year-old girl until a few days later when I looked at the bookshelves and saw all these books by C.S. Lewis. He was my hero, but I had no idea that it was Jack. Certainly for, I should think, nearly a week, I was unable to look at him, to speak to him. I felt so shy. I just thought he was wonderful, which he was. Jack was an extremely kind man to you personally. Oh, he was the kindest person. I mean, when I left, he paid my fees at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two years. I could never have had that training without him. He changed my life because he allowed me to become a professional actress. Jill is possibly the only person surviving who knew Minto and who witnessed the relationship between her and Jack. It was the most loving, gentle, kind relationship between the two of them, more visibly from his side because she was a feisty lady and I don't think she showed her emotions very easily. When I got there, I found that she had open varicose ulcers on her legs, but Jack was so gentle with her and so kind and so loving and always looking after her and trying to do the best for her that he could. Lewis was a man with a strong desire to change lives for the better, but there was one person he couldn't much help. Minto, his first love, had been there for Jack for 33 years, but she was suffering from dementia and he was fretted by two worries, the illness itself and having to find £500 a year to pay for her care. And then, in January 1951, the worry was taken from him. Dear old Minto died. The death of the second woman he had so loved must have reminded him of the first, of his mother, whom he lost at the tender age of nine, a time when he felt so terribly alone. In 1954, the University of Cambridge offered its first chair of Medieval and Renaissance English Literature to Lewis. It was a post tailor-made and designed with him in mind. His Allegory of Love was the standard text on courtly love and he'd just completed his impressive volume on 16th century literature. It's astonishing, then, that when Cambridge offered him the job, he declined it, twice. His reasons were entirely emotional. Lewis believed when Cambridge offered him this job that he'd have to come for the whole term, eight weeks and more, so be away from Oxford for the best part of two or three months. And this was something he felt he just couldn't do. Partly he loved the pubs and his friends in Oxford, but the real reason was Warnie. He was the only person who'd really care for Warnie when Warnie was in the grip of alcoholism. Obviously, Jack couldn't explain that to Cambridge, but Professor Tolkien was the hero of the hour. He told Cambridge that Lewis was frightened of leaving Oxford for such a long time and they said, of course you can commute. After he learnt that, Lewis accepted the job. Lewis immediately liked Cambridge, and unlike Oxford, Cambridge liked him. Lewis decided the Fenland town was smaller, softer and more old-fashioned. Jack gave his first lecture on his 56th birthday, 29th November 1954. The move to a new university made the headlines. The BBC even considered doing a live broadcast of a lecture which promised to be an absolute corker. Lewis presented to an appreciative audience not an argument, but a man, himself. The old world from classical times to the 19th century was all essentially the same. Then came machines and atheism. Lewis wasn't part of the modern, unbelieving, technologically advancing world. He was prehistoric and glad of it. He ended his lecture by telling his Cambridge audience that what they'd hired was an example of old Western man. He was selling himself as a kind of intellectual dinosaur. It was rather an absurd claim since he belonged to the same generation as the people to whom he was speaking. What I suppose he meant was he was a modern man who simply hated being modern. Despite Lewis's insistence that he firmly belonged in the past, it looked as though he would last forever. He had 13 more books in him and more than 40 articles and papers. The Four Loves in 1960 was the mature reflections of a man who could look back on a lifetime of relationships. With the wartime publication in the United States of the through-tape letters, Lewis had become internationally famous. With that fame came a vast correspondence, particularly American. Lewis made a point of replying to everyone. He had hundreds of pen friends, and one August day in 1952 found him in this hotel, the Eastgate, awaiting a meeting with one of those pen friends. He'd never met her. She was an American woman, and they'd agreed to meet here for a cup of tea and a chat. Joy Davidman was a former communist and aspiring writer, married, but very unhappily, with two sons. She was 16 years younger than Jack Lewis and fell in love with him, or with the idea of him. Douglas Gresham was the younger of Joy's two sons. He and his brother David would eventually become Jack's stepsons. He had never before met a mind quite so active and quite so broadly educated as her. Really? Absolutely. She was actually more widely read than he was. Jack had read everything in Europe, but my mother had read everything in Europe and everything in America as well. Do you think at that stage they were friends, really? Very good friends, indeed. Of course, she'd been communicating with Jack by mail for some years. Oh, she had? Yes, indeed. Of course, she was divorced. Yes. The Foreign Office had said that they were not going to renew her visitor's visa. Jack, very charitably, said, well, look, the answer to this, as you're so insistent you really, really want to stay in England, or rather you did, why don't we have a civil marriage ceremony, was his idea. But it wasn't a marriage of love at that stage. No, it wasn't. I think that didn't happen until quite some time later. Lewis called his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and now he really was surprised by a person called Joy, and so were his friends. Bachelor Lewis had now become the stepfather of two little boys, and the fusty old kilns was being knocked into shape by an energetic American woman. But it wasn't to be long before everything turned to catastrophe. The telephone rang, and she'd been in pain, but was diagnosed with sciatica and things like that for some time, quite a large amount of pain, and she went to answer the telephone, tripped and snapped her thigh bone. She was taken off to hospital and found to be suffering from what they thought was going to be very shortly terminal cancer. I was taken to the hospital having come back from school to be told that my mother was dying, and I was ten years old, and I knew no other human being in the world really to relate to other than my mother. She was expected to die within days or weeks, and not to live any longer than that. Jack had been here before. Both women closest to him he had loved and lost, and memories must have rushed back. But with them, something new. The agonies of a woman he'd married as a favour seemed to have inspired something deeper. He wrote to his friend Dorothy L Sayers, We soon learn to love what we know we must lose. Joy might not have long, and he needed to act fast. He asked a pupil of his, now a priest, named Peter Bide, for a bedside marriage, this time with a Christian ceremony. Peter Bide said, What else could I do? The woman was dying. Lewis clearly loved her. Peter Bide had a history of healing. I think Lewis felt that that actually happened because Joy went into remission shortly afterwards, and Lewis and Joy seemed to have enjoyed at least some time of relative happiness before, unfortunately, the cancer came back. In July 1960, Joy Lewis died at home with her husband at her bedside. He was plunged into despair, left doubting the very God he'd spent so many years explaining, championing, defending, believing. He had held on to his faith when Minto died. Now Lewis felt abandoned. His crisis of faith would be the last great turmoil of his life. No-one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. They're the opening words of A Grief Observed, and the manuscript is preserved here in the Bodleian Library. It's an intensely moving thing, looking at this manuscript. It's written almost without correction, only 34 pages, every one of which is so raw, so grief-stricken, so full of pain, so honest. I think that's why it made such an enormous impact on so many different readers. Whether you're contemplating your own death or whether you're in the hideous agony of grieving for somebody you love, this is a book which speaks to you. Do you think he lost his faith after she died? I don't think Lewis lost his faith. I think it went through a period of recalibration. I think that Lewis began to realise that simplistic rationalisations of faith actually had their limits, and there were certain things that couldn't quite be put in those simple categories he'd used earlier in his career. Many would say that A Grief Observed is a much more mature and wise and raw book than the simple rationalist argument of A Problem Of Pain. Jack joined Joy and Minto just three years later, dying from prostate cancer only seven days short of his 65th birthday on the 22nd of November, 1963. On that bleak, raw November day, almost nobody came to the burial. Warney had taken to his bed, too drunk to tell anybody the time of the funeral. And in a world at large, in the newspaper, on the wireless, Jack's death was overshadowed by the news of President Kennedy's assassination on the very same day and the passing of Aldous Huxley. So his death, like so much in C.S. Lewis's life, was almost a secret. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Lewis set himself up as an intellectual at war with his own times. But he wasn't really an intellectual. He was always a man guided by his heart rather than by his head. In fact, he had the temperament of a poet, even though he couldn't write poetry. And although he was a man who lived his life in an exclusively male world of colleges, that life was punctuated by the loss of the three women he loved.