for wondering if it were not one writer, but three, with whom he was becoming acquainted: three men who just happened to have the same name and the same peculiar vigor of thought and utterance. Such a reader (I will venture to put myself in his shoes) might, to avoid confusion, adopt the nomenclature L1, L2, and L3, L1 being a distinguished and original literary critic, L2 a highly successful author of fiction, and L3 the writer and broadcaster of popular Christian apologetics.4
Barfield went on to point out that one of the first things the ‘unsophisticated person’ would notice is that, while admirers of Lewis the Original Literary Critic usually have little interest in the Lewis the Christian Apologist, readers of both Lewis the Original Literary Critic and Lewis the Christian Apologist are interested in Lewis the Writer of Fiction. Another thing such a person would notice, said Barfield, is that Lewis the Original Literary Critic has received much less attention than the other two Lewises, and that it would hardly be too much to say that the Literary Critic has been ‘swamped’ by the Apologist and the Writer of Fiction.
The other two Lewises mentioned by Owen Barfield are ‘the one before and the other after his conversion’.5 Given that Lewis was now a Christian, how were these four remaining Lewises related? Again I turn to Owen Barfield who knew them longer and probably thought more about them than anyone:
The unity of all these Lewises is to my feeling as impressive, or even more impressive, than their diversity. Others, of course, have drawn attention to it, but I am not sure that anyone has succeeded in locating it. Some have pointed to his ‘style,’ but it goes deeper than that. ‘Consistency?’ Noticeable enough in spite of an occasional inconsistency here or there. His unswerving ‘sincerity’ then? That comes much nearer, but still does not satisfy me. Many other writers are sincere—but they are not Lewis. No. There was something in the whole quality and structure of his thinking, something for which the best label I can find is ‘presence of mind.’ If I were asked to expand on that, I could say only that somehow what he thought about everything was secretly present in what he said about anything.6
While all but the last three letters in Volume I were written by the unconverted Lewis, those in Volume II were written by the convert.
As it turns out, the neglected Original Literary Critic is the first C. S. Lewis to appear in this volume. Lewis would have considered it unconscionable to use his tutorials, lectures and letters as a pulpit for his Christian beliefs, but his conversion to the Faith certainly made a difference, not least to the book he began writing in 1928 and which was published in 1936 as The Allegory of Love: A Study of Medieval Tradition. ‘A believed idea,’ he said, ‘feels different from an idea that is not believed.’7 Or, as he observed in 29 January 1941 to Mary Neylan, once his pupil, ‘One of the minor rewards of conversion is to be able to see at last the real point of all the old literature which we are brought up to read with the point left out!’8
Shortly before The Allegory of Love was published, Oxford University Press had announced that it was undertaking the production of The Oxford History of English Literature in twelve volumes, each the work of a single author. Lewis was persuaded to write the volume on the sixteenth century and although English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama would not be published until 1954, he was labouring over this magisterial work during most of the years the letters in this volume were being written. ‘When they asked me to do that,’ he told one of his students, ‘I was tremendously flattered. It’s like a girl committing herself to marrying an elderly millionaire who’s also a duke. In the end she finally has to settle down with the chap, and it’s a hellish long time before he dies.’9
The next Lewis to appear is Barfield’s Highly Successful Author of Fiction. This volume contains many letters Lewis wrote in response to the wide appeal of his interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943) and That Hideous Strength (1945). But just when the tone of the letters suggests that Lewis had written all the fiction he would write, the book concludes with an unexpected ‘twist’.
To understand the unexpectedness of the ‘twist’ it is necessary to summarize Lewis’s relationship to Mrs Janie King Moore up to the end of this book.10 Lewis met Mrs Moore in 1917, shortly after she arrived in Oxford with her eleven-year-old daughter, Maureen.11 Mrs Moore was in Oxford because her son, Edward ‘Paddy’ Moore, was a member of the Officers’ Training Corps billeted in Keble College.12 Lewis began his training with the Officers’ Training Corps at the same time, and he and Paddy shared a room in Keble. Lewis came to know Paddy’s family, and the young men promised each other that if either of them survived the war he would look after Lewis’s father and Paddy’s mother. When their training ended Paddy was sent to France with the Rifle Brigade, and Lewis soon followed with the Somerset Light Infantry. Paddy was killed at Pargny on 24 March 1918, and Lewis was wounded weeks later in the Battle of Arras.
When Lewis returned to Oxford in 1919 to continue his studies at University College, he was joined by Mrs Moore and Maureen who took accommodation in Headington. Mrs Moore, forty-seven at this time, had been separated from her husband since 1908. Thereafter, the ‘family’, as Lewis began to refer to himself and the Moores, lived in numerous rented properties until, in 1930, they bought The Kilns in Headington Quarry.
Roger Lancelyn Green and I pointed out in our biography of Lewis that while his relationship with Mrs Moore ‘may have started with that incomprehensible passion which middle-aged women seem occasionally able to inspire in susceptible youths…it soon turned from the desire for a mistress into the creation of a mother-substitute.’13 Indeed we come across what may be the first reference to Mrs Moore as ‘mother’ in a letter to Sister Penelope of 9 November 1941, in which Lewis asked her to ‘Pray for Jane…She is the old lady I call my mother and live with (she is really the mother of a friend)—an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her.’14
By the middle of the 1940s Mrs Moore, in her late seventies, was crippled, often in great pain, and in need of constant care. Lewis divided his time between his duties at Magdalen College and nursing his old friend. ‘My mother is old & infirm, we have little and uncertain help, and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and a domestic servant’,15 Lewis wrote to Lord Salisbury on 9 March 1947. It was not in Lewis’s nature to abandon anyone and by the spring of 1949 the situation was worse. Mrs Moore could hardly be left alone for a minute and Lewis was worn out.
But just when he feared that old age had crept up on him and that his literary impulses were drying up, he began dreaming of lions. Suddenly Aslan, the great royal beast of Narnia, bounded in. ‘Apart from that,’ Lewis said, ‘I don’t know where the Lion came from or why he came. But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him.’16 This volume ends with Lewis writing to Owen Barfield and the illustrator of Narnia, Pauline Baynes, about one of the best-loved books in the world, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
There is