Introduction by Walter Hooper
C. S. Lewis made a number of attempts to keep a diary when he was a boy, but all were short lived. Then, at the age of 23, when an undergraduate at Oxford, he began a new diary which runs to over a quarter of a million words and covers the years 1922–27. This was the pre-Christian Lewis, an atheist whose objections to the Faith were ventilated in this attempt. He persevered because it was meant to be not just about his life, but that of his friend Mrs Moore. Several times he records how he fell behind and how Mrs Moore insisted that he pick it up again. Much of its documentary content was dictated by her interest in recording the pleasures and disappointments caused by the many visitors to their house. And, as the diary makes clear, Mrs Moore was its primary audience. Lewis often read it aloud to her, and she could have looked at it at any time. Thus, we do not get an entirely unguarded account of Mrs Moore by Lewis, but we do learn very much about his day to day life.
When C. S. Lewis came up to Oxford in April 1917 Europe was at war. He could have claimed exemption from military service by being Irish. But Jack Lewis, as his friends called him, believed he should earn his right to be in the University by passing through the Officers’ Training Corps (O.T.C.) into the Army. Lewis, who was eighteen at the time, was a Scholar of University College and, despite the fact that most of the buildings were being used as an army hospital, he greatly enjoyed the company of the twelve men still left there. Though Lewis was at the stage of loving Oxford, he cared very little for England as a whole. It wasn’t, then, surprising that he should be especially attracted to another Irishman in his college, Theobald Butler. One of the effects of being around the colourful Butler, other than getting ‘royally drunk’, was that Lewis became nostalgic. Writing to his Belfast friend, Arthur Greeves, on 27 May about a conversation with Butler he said, ‘Like all Irish people who meet in England we ended by criticisms on the invincible flippancy and dulness of the Anglo-Saxon race. After all, there is no doubt, ami, that the Irish are the only people: with all their faults I would not gladly live or die among another folk.’
In this he was certainly to get what he wanted. After only one term the O.T.C. required Lewis to give up his rooms in University College and join a cadet battalion in Keble College. This was 8 June 1917 and here again he found himself with another of his countrymen. His roommate was Edward Francis Courtenay ‘Paddy’ Moore who was born in Dublin and came to Keble from Clifton College in Bristol. Lewis made a number of good friends in the O.T.C., but from the first he preferred Paddy and his Irish family. Paddy’s mother, Mrs Janie King Moore, who was 45 at this time, had come down from Bristol with her eleven year-old daughter, Maureen, to be with her son for as long as possible before he went overseas. Lewis seems to have met the entire family during his first week in Keble College and his first mention of Mrs Moore comes in a letter to his father, Albert Lewis, of 18 June: ‘Moore, my room mate, comes from Clifton and is a very decent sort of man: his mother, an Irish lady, is staying up here and I have met her once or twice.’ Following a week of army manoeuvres in Warwick, he wrote to his father on 27 August saying, ‘We came back on Saturday, and the following week I spent with Moore at the digs of his mother who, as I mentioned, is staying at Oxford. I like her immensely and thoroughly enjoyed myself.’
When the course at Keble College was over the men were given a month’s leave (18 September–18 October) before joining their regiments. By this time Lewis and Paddy’s family were so mutually fond of one another that he disappointed his father greatly by spending a disproportionate three weeks of it with the Moores and only the last week at home. Lewis had come down with a feverish cold, and as soon as they were in his friends’ house in 56 Ravenswood Road, Bristol, Mrs Moore insisted that he remain in bed till she could nurse him back to health. ‘It was during this period,’ Warren (‘Warnie’) Lewis was to write later, ‘that a relationship first began that had a huge and determining effect upon the pattern of his subsequent life.’
Mrs Moore was the eldest child of a Church of Ireland clergyman, The Reverend William James Askins (1842–95), and his wife Jane King Askins (1846–90). She was born on 28 March 1872 in Pomeroy, County Tyrone, where her father was a curate (1869–72). Mr Askins became Vicar of Dunany, County Louth, in 1872 and his daughter was baptised Janie King in the church of Dunany on 21 July 1872. It was in Dunany, a small village on the east coast of Ireland, midway between Belfast and Dublin, that Janie grew up. Her father was the Vicar there until his death in 1895, and he and Mrs Askins had three sons, William, John and Robert, and two more daughters, Edith and Sarah.
On 1 August 1897 Janie married Courtenay Edward Moore, who, like herself, came from an Irish ecclesiastical family. He was the son of Canon Courtenay Moore (1840–1922), Rector of Mitchelstown in County Cork, and Jessie Mona Duff (1843–1936). Courtenay was born in Dublin on 26 June 1870 and, after four years (1884–88) at Haileybury College in Hertford, he took a B.A. from Trinity College Dublin in 1893. After he and Janie married they lived in Dublin where he was a Civil Engineer. Paddy was born on 17 November 1898 and Maureen on 19 August 1906. Not long after this they separated, under circumstances and causes entirely unknown to us. At this time divorce was granted in Ireland for only the gravest of causes, and it is unlikely that the Moores ever applied for one. What happened was that Mrs Moore went to live in Bristol where her brother Dr Robert Askins was a government medical officer, and where Paddy was admitted to Clifton College in May 1908. Mrs Moore thereafter usually referred to her husband as ‘The Beast’, but for all her ill words for him, he came from two good families. It was through his mother that Maureen inherited a baronetcy and became Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs with a castle and an estate in Caithness, Scotland.
Of that three-week stay in 56 Ravenswood Road it is evident that Lewis savoured to the full the hospitality afforded by Mrs Moore. They all knew it could not be like this again for a long time because Lewis had already been gazetted into the 3rd Somerset Light Infantry and Paddy into the Rifle Brigade. And if the young men didn’t come back from the war? Maureen was twelve at the time, and she told me some years ago that she remembered hearing Lewis and her brother promise one another that if only one survived the war he would look after Paddy’s mother and Lewis’s father.
Lewis joined his regiment at Crownhill in South Devon on 19 October 1917. It was rumoured that they would be sent to Ireland to fight the Sinn Féin and they were very surprised when, on 15 November, they were ordered to the front following a 48-hour leave. It would have taken every one of those hours to make a round trip to Ireland, so on 15 November Lewis rushed to Mrs Moore’s home in Bristol.
From here he sent the following telegram to his father: ‘Have arrived Bristol on 48 hours leave. Report Southampton Saturday. Can you come Bristol. If so meet at Station. Reply Mrs Moore’s address 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol. Jack.’ To anyone in this country a soldier reporting to Southampton in 1917 could only mean that he was being sent overseas. But Albert Lewis wired back: ‘Don’t understand telegram. Please write.’ In desperation, Jack wired back the following morning: ‘Orders France. Reporting Southampton 4 p.m. Saturday. If coming wire immediately.’ Mr Lewis did not come. And Jack, after being transferred to the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, crossed to France on 17 November.
Lewis arrived at the front line trenches on 29 November, his nineteenth birthday. In February 1918 he ‘had the good luck’, as he said, ‘to fall sick with what the troops call “trench fever” and the doctors P.U.O. (Pyrexia, unknown origin)’. This meant a delightful three weeks in a hospital at Le Tréport, during which he wrote some of the poems which appeared in Spirits in Bondage (1919). From the letters he wrote to Arthur while in hospital it is clear that he believed his old friend needed to know that he had not been replaced in his affections by Mrs Moore. ‘I must admit fate has played strange with me since last winter,’ Lewis wrote on 2 February. ‘I feel that I have definitely got into a new epoch of life and one feels extraordinarily helpless over it . . . As for the older days of real walks far away in the hills . . . Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life.’
Lewis rejoined his battalion at Fampoux on 28 February. He was one of those who faced the final German attack on the Western Front, and on 15 April he was wounded at Mount Bernenchon during the Battle of Arras. The casualties were very great, and after he reached the Liverpool Merchants Mobile Hospital at Etaples he learned that several of his friends had been killed. Jack was still at Etaples when he wrote to his father on 14 May saying: ‘My friend Mrs Moore is in great trouble—Paddy has been missing for over a month and is almost certainly dead. Of all my own particular set at Keble he has been the first to go, and it is pathetic to remember that he at least was always certain that he would come through.’
Lewis was transferred to the Endsleigh Palace Hospital in London on 25 May. From the time he got back to England he began begging his father to come and visit him. Here, again, Warren Lewis’s ‘Memoir’, the best thing ever written about C. S. Lewis, is very helpful. ‘My father was a very peculiar man in some respects,’ he said, ‘in none more than in an almost pathological hatred of taking any step which involved a break in the dull routine of his daily existence.’ Even so, it is hard to see how Albert Lewis could resist the entreaties of a son just back from such a bloody war. Writing to Mr Lewis on 20 June 1918 Jack said: ‘I know I have often been far from what I should in my relations to you, and have undervalued an affection and a generosity which . . . an experience of “other people’s parents” has shown me in a new light. But, please God, I shall do better in the future. Come and see me. I am homesick, that is the long and the short of it . . . This week Mrs Moore has been up on a visit to her sister who works at the War Office, and we have seen a good deal of each other. I think it some comfort to her to be with someone who was a friend of Paddy’s and is a link with the Oxford days: she has certainly been a very, very good friend to me.’
On 25 June Lewis was transferred to a hospital at Clifton, near Bristol, which he had chosen so that he could have the society of Mrs Moore. Again he remained unvisited by his father. In the middle of September it was confirmed that Paddy was dead and when Lewis was moved to Perham Down Camp in Ludgershall, Hampshire, on 4 October Mrs Moore went with him. The last part of Jack’s convalescence was spent at a hospital at Eastbourne, and from there he wrote to his father on 8 December saying: ‘At my suggestion Mrs Moore has come down here and is staying in rooms near the camp, where I hope she will remain until I go on leave.’
Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918. Jack, however, was given to understand that he would not be given leave before Christmas. Nevertheless, Warnie was able to write in his diary of 27 December: ‘A red letter day. We were sitting in the study about eleven o’clock this morning when we saw a cab coming up the avenue. It was Jack! He had been demobilized, thank God. Needless to say there were great doings. He is looking pretty fit . . . In the evening there was bubbly for dinner in honour of the event: the first time I have ever had champagne at home.’
Jack returned to Oxford on 13 January 1919 and took up residence in University College. He was reading the most celebrated of the arts courses at Oxford which is known as Literae Humaniores, or ‘Greats’ to give it its slang name. ‘It was a great return and something to be very thankful for,’ he wrote to his father on 27 January. ‘There is of course already a great difference between this Oxford and the ghost I knew before: true, we are only twenty-eight in College, but we do dine in Hall again, the Junior Common Room is no longer swathed in dust sheets, and the old round of lectures, debates, games, and what not is getting under weigh. The reawakening is a little pathetic: at our first J.C.R. Meeting we read the minutes of the last—1914. I don’t know any little thing that has made me realize the absolute suspension and waste of these years more thoroughly.’
In 1919 the average cost of living in one of the twenty colleges which made up Oxford University was about £60 a term. (At this time £1 was worth about 5 US dollars.) Lewis’s scholarship from University College was worth £80 a year, but after all his college expenses were paid he was left with about £11 per term. Mr Lewis was giving him £67 per term, as well as paying incidental expenses. Besides this, Mr Lewis worked very hard to get his son a ‘wounds gratuity’ from the army, and Jack received £145 in March 1919 and a further £104 in July. This £234 (excluding the wounds gratuity) would have allowed for some luxury for a man living in College—Albert Lewis was indeed very generous with his son. But as Warnie Lewis observed in his ‘Memoir’: ‘since an allowance calculated to suit a bachelor living in college was by no means enough for a householder, Jack found himself miserably poor.’
Of course Lewis’s father and brother didn’t know Jack’s new ‘family’, as he called Mrs Moore and Maureen, had followed him to Oxford. They were living two miles east of the centre of town at the home of Miss Featherstone in 28 Warneford Road—the same house they were in when the Diary opens—and not far from Headington School where Maureen became a day pupil soon after they arrived in Oxford. Jack confided to Arthur Greeves in a letter of 26 January: ‘After breakfast I work (in the library or a lecture-room which are both warm) or attend lectures until 1 o’clock when I bycycle out to Mrs Moore’s. 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.’ We don’t know how much money Mrs Moore was receiving from her husband, but it does not seem to have stretched far.
Jack lived in University College for three terms as he was required to do by the statutes of the University. After that he was allowed to ‘reside and keep term in lodgings situated within three miles of Carfax’—that is, from the centre of town. It is surely proof of their mutual dependency and Lewis’s love of domesticity that he was able to take three first class degrees even while being constantly uprooted. They were all so poor that they were forced to live in a number of vile places. Between 1917 and 1930 they lived in nine different houses.
Lewis concealed all this from his father. Even before his first term at Oxford had ended, when of course his father expected him home, Jack was setting the pattern for years to come by fabricating some excuse for remaining in Oxford with his new family. ‘I shall be staying up for a week more following [his tutor’s] instructions,’ Jack wrote to his father on 15 March 1919. ‘After that I shall go down to help Mrs Moore with her move at Bristol: she has had to come back to clear out the house. There seems to be considerable difficulty about getting anywhere else. London and Bristol are both hopeless: I have suggested here, but that seems equally impossible.’ The truth is that ‘the family’ had been in Oxford since January. The same thing was to happen again when Lewis wrote to his father from Somerset on 4 April 1920 saying, ‘I thought it a good opportunity of paying off an engagement with a man who has been asking me for some time to go and “walk” with him.’ But in his letter to Arthur of 11 April we learn that he was really with the Moores.
It is hard to say how much Albert Lewis ever knew about Jack’s joint establishment with the Moores. He was certainly aware that Jack was seeing Mrs Moore during his first term back in Oxford and he wrote to Warnie about this. And Warnie, who was in Belgium, said in a letter of 10 May: ‘The Mrs. Moore business is certainly a mystery but I think perhaps you are making too much of it. Have you any idea of the footing on which he is with her? Is she an intellectual? It seems to me preposterous that there can be anything in it. But the whole thing irritates me by its freakishness.’ Albert replied on 20 May: ‘I confess I do not know what to do or say about Jack’s affair. It worries and depresses me greatly. All I know about the lady is that she is old enough to be his mother—that she is separated from her husband and that she is in poor circumstances. I also know that Jacks has frequently drawn cheques in her favour running up to £10—for what I don’t know. If Jacks were not an impetuous, kind hearted creature who could be cajoled by any woman who has been through the mill, I should not be so uneasy. Then there is the husband whom I have always been told is a scoundrel—but the absent are always to blame—some where in the background, who some of these days might try a little amiable black mailing. But outside all these considerations that may be the outcome of a suspicious, police court mind, there is the distraction from work and the folly of the daily letters. Altogether I am uncomfortable.’ Apart from this there is very little in Albert’s letters to Warnie about Mrs Moore. What I feel it would be a pity to forget about this good man—something Jack and Warnie mentioned often—is that he supported his son through all his undergraduate years and up to his being made a Fellow of Magdalen College.
More presciently than anyone, Albert Lewis suspected the presence of elements in the liaison that were profoundly unhealthy. A surrogate mother-son relationship is not among these: Jack and Mrs Moore had suffered reciprocal losses, so to speak, and a symbiotic solution to that problem is neither unnatural, nor uncommon, nor morally troublesome. But the rapidity and depth of Jack’s involvement, the initiatives taken by Mrs Moore to assure it, her acquiescence in Jack’s lies and his readiness to lie in the first place—Albert Lewis is the only person with whom we know Jack to have broken faith—together invite such words as ‘affair’, ‘mischief’, and ‘blackmail’, all used by Albert in discussing the liaison.
The notion of sexual intimacy between the two must be regarded as likely. The sensual young atheist lives with a not unattractive woman, still in early middle age, who is not only available to him but very likely possessed of an agenda of her own: the young man is, as his father points out, fundamentally good-natured and easily manipulated, and the woman—in that society, at that time—would surely benefit from the presence of a man in the household. This combination of motive, means, and opportunity invites, though it does not demand, the conclusion that Janie King Moore and C. S. Lewis were lovers.
Lewis himself must have implied as much in a conversation with Arthur Greeves during the visit to Belfast in October 1917, and about which he later expressed regret. When he wrote to Arthur on 28 October he said: ‘Since coming back & meeting a certain person I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try & forget my various statements & not to refer to the subject.’ And taboo it probably remained for the rest of Lewis’s life.
Thus it is unwise to overinterpret. The nature of their intimacy, its duration, and the circumstances under which it ended are largely unknown to us. What is known is the day-to-day devotion shown by C. S. Lewis to Mrs Moore until her death, after a long mental and physical decline, at the age of 78. Life is more richly textured—or as Lewis would put it, ‘thicker’—than we expect it to be. None of us is either this or that; rather we and all the ‘ordinary’ people we meet and know are many things at once, full of shading and nuance. This story may have begun in self-indulgence, cynicism and sin, but it ended as an enduring exemplum of Christian charity—and of Divine Economy.
After Albert Lewis died on 25 September 1929, aged 66 years, the family papers were brought to Oxford. Warnie Lewis spent much of the next few years editing those papers as well as his and Jack’s diaries, and in the end they filled eleven bound volumes. After his own diary was in typescript Jack went through it and supplied footnotes where he thought they were needed. Both brothers’ notes have been retained in this edition. Warnie’s magnificent achievement is usually referred to as the Lewis Papers, the original of which is in Wheaton College in Illinois with a copy in the Bodleian Library. The Lewis Papers is the major source of the diary. Another source is a notebook Warren Lewis gave me in 1964 and which contains, amongst other things, the original of Lewis’s diary for the period 27 April 1926—2 March 1927.
Neither of the brothers were good spellers, and Warnie used to say that he could never remember whether he kept a ‘diary’ or a ‘dairy’. His most characteristic mistake was altering such contractions as ‘can’t’ to ‘ca’nt’. Besides errors such as this in the Lewis Papers, there were others which were the inevitable result of typing several thousand pages with two fingers. Because I could not distinguish between Warnie’s and Jack’s spelling errors I corrected that portion of the diary found only in the Lewis Papers. From 27 April 1926 onwards I have followed C. S. Lewis’s original spelling as found in his notebook.
Those who have read a typescript version of the diary in the Lewis Papers will have noticed that throughout it Lewis refers to Mrs Moore as ‘D’. I discovered from that portion of the diary in the notebook that the abbreviation Lewis used throughout his diary, and which Warnie Lewis could not reproduce with his typewriter, was the Greek letter ∆ (Delta). I have retained the letter ‘D’ because both brothers had approved the use of it. Jack and Warnie called Mrs Moore ‘Minto’, and I am unable to say whether ∆ has any meaning other than being a useful abbreviation.
Lewis brought his diary to an end with the entry of 2 March 1927. And although they were not copied into the Lewis Papers, the notebook contains several more pages of diary. Lewis wrote entries for 19–22 January and 2–3 June 1928 in Old English and an entry for 4 June 1928 in Latin. The notebook also contains ‘portraits’ or written descriptions of nine of Lewis’s colleagues at Magdalen College during the time the last portion of his diary was being written. I believe they were meant to accompany the diary and I have included them in an appendix.
The most significant difference between this book and what is in the Lewis Papers, is that this is a good deal shorter. The whole diary runs, as I’ve said, to over a quarter of a million words and the Lewis Estate and the publishers felt it would be acceptable to more readers if it were cut by about a third. I have tried to do this in such a way that none of Lewis’s main interests—friends, books, domestic life—would be lost. There was a great deal of repetition in the complete diary, and I have mainly cut out some of the many details of domestic chores which I dare say Lewis was happy to forget when they were written down.
I thank all those who have helped with the editing of this book. I have particular reason to be grateful to Mr Owen Barfield, Miss Nan Dunbar of Somerville College, Mr and Mrs Colin Hardie, Mr George Sayer, Professor James Como and Brother Paul Browne O.S.B. The editing of this book was made especially pleasurable because of the help I received from Miss Lesley Walmsley of Collins Publishers and John Ferrone of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and I thank them both.
Walter Hooper
21 August 1990
Oxford