Laura Miller (18 page)

Lewis objected to the gyneolatry of some chivalric romances at least as far back as
The Allegory of Love,
and with the Green Witch he got the chance to portray it as an outright evil. In writing about Chrétien de Troyes’s
Lancelot,
he called the devotion of Lancelot to Guinevere “revolting” for its tendency to “ape religious devotion.” The sin, as he sees it, is primarily Guinevere’s; his antipathy toward her has an oddly personal tone. True, she does demand impossible feats and perfect obedience from her lover — but that is her role. Guinevere is the taskmaster whose rigor enables Lancelot to demonstrate that he is the ideal knight. In real life, she’d be a monster, but this is the realm of medieval romance, as Lewis is usually so eager to remind us, not the psychological domain of the modern novel.

Nevertheless, Lewis can’t resist treating Guinevere as if she
were
a character in a realistic novel; he refers to one of her tall orders as an example of the queen taking yet “another opportunity of exercising her power.” He even sets aside his own admonitions to think medievally long enough to compare Guinevere and other chivalric heroines to twentieth-century ladies who drag their men on shopping trips, expecting them “to leap up on errands, to go through heat or cold,” whenever they are bidden. If chivalry was not yet dead, Lewis certainly wished it so; abolishing it was one form of modernization he could wholeheartedly endorse. In
The Silver Chair,
Rilian declares that upon his return from the underworld, “I shall do all by the counsel of my Lady, who will then be my Queen, too. Her word shall be my law.” Jill retorts, “Where I come from . . . they don’t think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.”

This was a persistent theme for Lewis, who wrote in
Surprised by Joy
that “the two things that some of us most dread for our own species” are “the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective.” He so resented the intrusion of his friends’ wives into his social life that he once wrote, “A friend dead is to be mourned: a friend married is to be guarded against, both being equally lost.”

Not a terribly remarkable attitude in a hidebound bachelor, perhaps. And a repressed professor is just what Lewis was, according to popular opinion, before the most famous event in his personal life: his late, happy marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham. Their romance has been richly idealized, first by Lewis in his memoir of Joy’s death from cancer in 1960,
A Grief Observed,
and later in the biographical radio play and film
Shadowlands.
In its pop culture incarnations, theirs is the sentimentally irresistible story of a tweedy, middle-aged don awakened to the bliss of romantic love at a stage in life when most people believe such things are behind them. (“He thought that magic only existed in books, and then he met her” was the movie’s tagline.)

Gresham was an American divorcée, a former communist, and a Jew who converted to Episcopalianism, inspired in part by Lewis’s apologetics. She wrote him fan letters and brought her two young sons with her to meet him when she visited England in the mid-1950s, most likely with the intention of deepening their epistolary friendship. The role religion played in their relationship makes their love story especially appealing to Lewis’s Christian admirers. I heard a lot about it when I visited the Kilns, the cottage in the Oxford suburb of Headington where Lewis lived for the last half of his life. Today the Kilns is maintained by the C. S. Lewis Foundation, an American group dedicated to “enabling a genuine renaissance of Christian scholarship and artistic expression.”

As we walked from room to room, the wholesome young woman who gave me the tour was able to tell me what Joy had done in nearly every corner of the house. I meekly interrupted every now and then to remind her that I was really only interested in what the place was like when Lewis wrote the Chronicles, before he met Joy Gresham. (That was no simple task. The Lewis brothers had allowed the house to lapse into squalor, and although the C. S. Lewis Foundation has restored it to impeccable condition, it has painted the ceiling of the sitting room a dirty yellow, in commemoration of the tobacco smoke residue that once coated it.) As we poked our heads into one oddly configured downstairs room, I asked what it had been used for around 1950, when Lewis was in the thick of inventing Narnia. No one was quite sure . . . perhaps they could check . . . but then, oh yes, that’s it: they were pretty sure that room had been Mrs. Moore’s.

Lewis’s marriage to Joy Gresham lasted four years, but before they met he had lived with another woman for over three decades. Lewis’s unconventional relationship with Janie “Minto” Moore is not the stuff that sentimental movies and other dreams are made of. In particular, Mrs. Moore presents Lewis’s most pious admirers with a dilemma. She was twenty years Lewis’s senior and had a teenage daughter named Maureen. She was married to another man, although permanently estranged from the husband she referred to only as “the Beast.” And she was an atheist, who derided the Masses that the Lewis brothers attended as “blood feasts.”

Lewis had befriended Janie Moore’s son, Patrick, in the army during World War I, and the two young men swore that should either of them fail to survive the war, the other would care for the parent of the deceased. Paddy Moore was killed in 1918, and Lewis proved as good as his word. He remained devoted to his friend’s mother, living with and helping to support her (although she did have a little money of her own) for the rest of her life, and Maureen until she married in 1940. Janie Moore, along with Warnie Lewis, was one of the three initial co-owners of the Kilns. When he began writing the Chronicles in the 1940s, Lewis had taken to calling her his “mother,” but most of his biographers concur that the relationship began as a romantic affair. (There is a tiny contingent who, for religious reasons, prefer to think that Lewis remained a virgin until he married, and an even tinier contingent who like to think he never consummated his love for Joy, whose divorce was not officially recognized by the Church of England.)

By 1943, when Lewis wrote to decline a speaking engagement at an American college, pleading the “difficulties” posed by a “very aged and daily more infirm mother,” his relationship to Minto had surely become platonic. His conversion to Christianity in 1931 would have made anything else unacceptable. But exactly what transpired between them during the thirty years they spent together remains a mystery, since Lewis refused to discuss it with anyone, except perhaps Arthur Greeves, and Arthur made a point of destroying letters he regarded as private. Lewis didn’t save copies himself and was an indifferent, impersonal diarist who gave up the practice entirely in 1927.

By default, Warren Lewis’s diaries and recollections are the source of much of the biographical material on his brother, and Warnie hated Minto. As a result, she doesn’t come off well in many accounts of Jack’s life, depending on how much credence a writer lends to Warnie’s versions of events. Some of Lewis’s biographers, A. N. Wilson in particular, have risen to her defense and insisted the relationship was not, as Warnie claimed, an unremitting trial. We can only guess at Lewis’s true feelings for Minto and how they evolved over time.

Janie Moore was an imperious woman, obsessed with the minor crises of the household and given to interrupting Lewis while he was at work, demanding that he run errands, make repairs, and take care of various chores on top of his duties as a university fellow and author. In one characteristic incident, described in Lewis’s short-lived diary, she asked him to try to exchange an antiquated iron wringer in downtown Oxford, then after he had hauled the unwanted device all the way back home to Headington, sent him out again to inquire after the purse she thought she’d left at the Oxford bus station — all while he was supposed to be working. He started on
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
when Minto was in her late seventies and by then she had deteriorated badly. She was bedridden and forgetful, insisting that her incontinent dog (whose health had become her obsession) be walked as many as a dozen times a day. Warnie’s occasional alcoholic binges made matters worse; during the year Lewis wrote the first Chronicle, he informed a friend that “dog stools and human vomit have made my day to day.”

Warnie had liked Mrs. Moore well enough when he first moved in with them in 1932, but he came to see her as a kind of vampire, sapping his brother’s time, health, and dignity; he claimed to have once overheard her telling someone that Jack was “as good as an extra maid in the house.” The peculiarities of her personality only intensified as she grew old, sick, and cranky. While Lewis was working on the first draft of
The Magician’s Nephew
(later put aside for
Prince Caspian
), he collapsed with a streptococcus infection that his doctor attributed to exhaustion. Warnie’s diary describes leaving his brother’s hospital room in a fury and arriving at the Kilns, where, he wrote in his diary, he “let her ladyship have a blunt statement of the facts” and demanded that Minto permit Jack a vacation. On the day she died in 1951, Warnie devoted several pages of his diary to reviling her, describing her relationship with his brother as “the rape of J’s life . . . I wonder how much of his time she did waste?”

Even if Warnie was exaggerating, why did Lewis — the man who had written, in
Surprised by Joy,
“always and at all ages (where I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted” — submit to such tyranny? He seems to have acquired in Janie Moore both that feminine preoccupation with trivialities he so disliked and his father’s aggravating intrusiveness. For someone who claimed to dread “the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective,” he set himself up in a situation where his own cherished autonomy was constantly overthrown by the needs of the household and its mistress. Perhaps there were compensations that Warnie didn’t appreciate. Lewis’s more recent biographers (those whom the affable Warnie, who survived his brother by ten years, never got the opportunity to charm) tend to think so. Especially in the early years, the relationship offered Jack, as Alan Jacobs puts it, “a depth of affection and tenderness on both sides from which Warnie was excluded and to which he was blind.”

Wilson believes that Lewis’s loyalty to Minto was cemented in his early twenties, after he was wounded in the war and hospitalized in England. Lewis’s father, who had a neurotic phobia about traveling or otherwise disrupting his routine, never came from Ireland to visit his son. This compounded the hurt Jack had felt when Albert hadn’t tried to see him before he was sent to the front; it was a time when everyone knew that many of the young men being sent there wouldn’t come back. Janie Moore, by contrast, had comforted Lewis on the eve of his deployment and nursed him after his return. Their relationship, then, began in genuine love and a maternal nurturance that the motherless Lewis no doubt found especially sweet.

Somehow, the important relationships in Lewis’s life had a tendency to resolve into obligations felt toward needy, importunate people. Take his brother: Warnie believed that his own best years were spent in the “Little End Room” of their boyhood home in Belfast, where the two brothers invented stories for their shared imaginary world. Warnie often talked of his desire to re-create that idyll with Jack and to live in it till the end of their days. When Albert died, in 1931, and the brothers had to empty and sell the Belfast house, Warnie was so upset at the prospect of other children playing with their old toys that the chest containing them had to be buried, unopened, in the backyard. Warnie could be jealous of Jack’s time and affection. Just before he came to live with them, Jack felt the need to write to his thirty-five-year-old brother, delicately explaining that the relationships he’d acquired as a grown man would always prevent a completely faithful reproduction of the Little End Room in Oxford.

In addition to tending to Minto and Warnie, Lewis kept up an exhausting correspondence with the strangers who began writing to him after his apologetics gained a wide audience. He seemed to regard all of the inconveniences imposed by others as lessons in humility and submission. In a letter written to Arthur just after Warnie moved in, he complained that he wasn’t getting enough solitude and then corrected himself: “what we call
hindrances
are really the raw material of spiritual life.” His relationship with Mrs. Moore was the most immediate and pressing of all these interruptions. You would think he’d be more understanding of Chrétien’s Lancelot; both knight and don subjected themselves to the command of an exacting lady as a way of serving a greater principle, chivalry in Lancelot’s case and Christianity in Lewis’s.

Only a saint (or an allegorical knight) could endure this sort of thing without anger, so it’s no wonder Lewis wrote waspishly of Guin-evere. She provided a safe target for the rage he must have felt toward Janie Moore. It’s unlikely he recognized the likeness consciously, or that he would ever have acknowledged it. For one thing, his own sacrifices had the Christian virtue of being entirely selfless; Lancelot enjoyed erotic fulfillment with Guinevere. Lewis once shared this with Minto, but by the time he wrote
The Allegory of Love
their relationship was quasifilial. It offered no sensual pleasure as compensation for all those hindrances. Still, who knows if he would have shouldered such a burden in the first place if he had not, long ago, fallen in love?

The beauty and desirability of women troubled Lewis even more than their frivolity. Guinevere’s beauty, as well as the attractions of the fiancée in “The Shoddy Lands” and of the domineering twentieth- century shoppers he snipes at in
The Allegory of Love,
are sources of illegitimate power. Desire acts as a honey trap to the unwary male, luring him into unworthy and catastrophic enterprises. The beauty of the Narnian witches isn’t ancillary to their evil, but integral to it, one of the weapons in their arsenal. Evil must, after all, appear attractive if it’s going to be tempting, and from there it’s only a small step further to the conclusion that feminine beauty is inherently wicked. It is certainly the cause of endless trouble in Narnia, even when its possessor means well. The spell that Lucy finds in the magician’s book, the one promising to “maketh beautiful her that uttereth it beyond the lot of mortals,” also foretells the consequences of such beauty: terrible wars among Lucy’s princely suitors that leave “nations laid waste.”