The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings (73 page)

Joy underwent radiation and three operations, during which doctors removed her ovaries and a small tumor in her breast and patched up her femur. “I never have loved her more than since she was struck down,” wrote Warnie, putting the best possible face on the nightmare. “Her pluck and cheerfulness are beyond praise, and she talks of her disease and its fluctuations as if she was describing the experiences of a friend of hers.” The truth is that during these months of treatment, Joy shuttled headlong between hope and despair, now trusting in the radiation to work a cure, now praying for grace, now feeling the grave close in, now undergoing “physical agony … combined with a strange spiritual ecstasy,” so that she knew “how martyrs felt.” When the radiation therapy failed, the demon of doubt wreaked havoc: “I am trying very hard to hold on to my faith, but I find it difficult; there seems such a gratuitous and merciless cruelty in this.” Lewis, however, refused to give up. He contacted Peter W. Bide, a former pupil of his, an Anglican priest in Sussex with a reputation as a faith healer, and asked him to visit Joy and perform a laying on of hands. When Bide arrived in Headington, Lewis immediately raised the possibility of a Christian wedding. Bide—a theological liberal—complied, thereby violating church regulations in what Warnie described as “a notable act of charity, for he is not of this Diocese, and had no right to do so without the Bp’s authority.” The wedding took place at 11:00 a.m. on March 21, 1957, at Joy’s hospital bedside. “I found it heartrending,” Warnie wrote, “and especially Joy’s eagerness for the pitiable consolation of dying under the same roof as J: though to feel pity for anyone so magnificently brave as Joy is almost an insult.”

The laying on of hands took place the same day. It proved but an early stage in Lewis’s quest for a miraculous cure. He began to pray that he might be allowed to assume Joy’s pain, in the sort of substitutionary miracle that Charles Williams had taught his followers to seek. Shortly after initiating these prayers, Lewis came down with osteoporosis—not an uncommon problem, especially among those who smoke heavily and weigh too much, as Lewis did. More puzzling was the simultaneous improvement in Joy’s condition. According to Nevill Coghill, hardly the most gullible of men, Lewis’s disease and Joy’s healing both issued from Lewis’s substitutionary action. It was, Coghill later reported, “a power which Lewis found himself … to possess, and which, he told me, he had been allowed to use to ease the suffering of his wife, a cancer victim, of whom the doctors had despaired.” Coghill asked him point-blank, “You mean that her pain left her, and that you felt it for her in your body?” Lewis replied, “Yes, in my legs. It was crippling. But it relieved hers.” At times the pain was so bad that Lewis screamed. He ceased his beloved rambles and took to wearing a surgical belt, a sort of corset that, he joked, “gives me a wonderfully youthful figure.” Photos of him and Joy taken at the time reveal the ravages of illness on both their faces; Lewis described one such image, which appeared in
The Observer
, as “a spiritualist picture of the ectoplasms of a dyspeptic orangutan and an immature Sorn.”

Coghill believed that Lewis’s uncanny healing skills were but one aspect of his “life-giving generosity,” which manifested itself as well in his widespread charity, about which he also kept silence. Lewis, however, urged caution in claiming a miracle. To Sheldon Vanauken, writing on November 27, 1957, he urged, “One dreams of a Charles Williams substitution! Well, never was a gift more gladly given; but one must not be fanciful.” His expressed view of the matter fluctuated depending upon whom he was addressing. To one correspondent he wrote, after the cancer had subsided, that there was “hardly any hope for the long term issue.” To Bede Griffiths he said that Joy’s condition “has improved, if not miraculously (but who knows?) at any rate wonderfully.” To an American correspondent, however, he dropped his defenses and declared that “the improvement in my wife’s condition is, in the proper use of the word, miraculous,” while to R. W. Chapman, he called it “almost miraculous.” Warnie makes no mention of a substitutionary miracle in his diary or memoir, but then he was not always privy to his brother’s religious reflections; one wonders, then, whether he ever shared with his brother something he had learned some years ago from Tolkien: Tolkien’s dentist, it seems, had the experience of suffering, in place of his young patient, the agony of the surgery he had to perform on her infected jaw—a phenomenon which Warnie felt could only be accounted for “by supposing Charles’s theory of Substitution to be fact and not fantasy.” It seems likely that Warnie would have related this story to his brother.

The truth is that Lewis, a firm believer in miracles, longed to believe that Joy had been the recipient of one, but he feared false optimism, as well as unwarranted claims upon God’s mercy, and so decided to guard his tongue, especially about a “Charles Williams substitution.” He did not refrain, however, from declaring how happy he was, wrapped in a felicity with beatitude at the core but bordered by tragedy. “My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before,” he told Dorothy L. Sayers. He assured Sister Penelope that she “wd. be surprised (or perhaps you would not?) to know how much of a strange sort of happiness and even gaiety” he and his wife now enjoyed, and he told Cecil Harwood that “we are often a great deal happier, merrier, delighted, than you wd. think possible.” He could see now, as he put it to Bede Griffiths, the great arc of his love as “something which began in Agape, proceeded to Philia, then became Pity, and only after that, Eros. As if the highest of these, Agape, had successfully undergone the sweet humiliation of an incarnation.” He, too, was becoming more enfleshed, by his carnal love for Joy and by his pains.

He became a brawling defender of her—now his—family. Bill Gresham, getting wind of Joy’s condition, had written to tell her that “naturally I shall want [the boys] to be with me in the event of your death.” Immediately Lewis dashed off a response, informing Bill that the boys opposed his plan, that they “remember you as a man who fired rifles thro’ ceilings to relieve his temper, broke up chairs, wept in public, and broke a bottle over Douglas’s head.” Evidently dissatisfied that this would do the trick, Lewis wrote again the same day, blasting Bill’s behavior toward Joy (“You have tortured one who was already on the rack”), underscoring the boys’ rejection of their father (“certain scenes … make you a figure of terror to them”), and then baring his teeth: “If you do not relent, I shall of course be obliged to place every legal obstacle in your way.” The tongue-lashing and teeth baring worked; Bill dropped the idea of reclaiming his sons.

It was shortly after this that Lewis began work on
Reflections on the Psalms.
The timing is apposite, for the wrenching emotions, among the most violent of his life, that he experienced during Joy’s illness and Bill’s aggression—the violent, clashing tides of anger and gratitude, fear and peace, despair and exaltation—parallel those expressed in the Psalter. Lewis knew the psalms intimately from his long experience with morning and evening prayer. Richard Ladborough remembers that he always showed up for weekday Matins at chapel, “the center of his life in college,” and this was true at Oxford as well, where he had attended services since 1933, despite his intense dislike for hymn singing. In addition, he read the evening psalms on a daily basis. Now he set to work to puzzle out, in all their lyrical and strident glory, these 150 ancient Hebrew songs of praise, thanksgiving, lament, and execration.

Here Lewis writes, in patient and pellucid prose, “for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself … one amateur to another.” This studied pose means that much of his presentation is introductory, as he explains the role of allegory, prophecy, and literary devices like parallelism. More compelling is his discussion of judgment, a major theme in the psalms, as he observes that while “Christians cry to God for mercy instead of justice;
they
[the ancient Israelites] cried to God for justice instead of injustice.” Christians see themselves as criminals; ancient Jews see themselves as plaintiffs. This is true, to a degree—in many psalms, the innocent party pleads divine redress for earthly transgression—but it is a partial truth, as the psalms offer self-incrimination as well (“Who can understand his errors? cleanse thou me from secret faults”—Psalms 19:12, KJV). When Lewis refers to “that typically Jewish prison of self-righteousness,” one winces at the adverb. His discussion of the multitudinous cursing psalms is more rewarding, both in its gratitude to Israel (to whom, he says, we “are indebted … beyond all possible repayment”) and in its argument that these songs, rife with hatred, echo God’s own anger at human sin. Other sections, on the psalmist’s understanding of death, nature, the law, and so on, instruct the novice and entertain the learned. Most notable, for the light it sheds on all Lewis’s religious writings, is his rejection of biblical literalism and his embrace of the manifold meaning of scripture, as well as its partial origin in earlier mythical models. The “Father of Lights,” he insists, is behind all “good work,” including the entirety of the revealed Word. By and large, reviewers saluted
Reflections on the Psalms
for its warmth and clarity, although a reviewer for
Blackfriars
, the Dominican Catholic journal, wished that “a little more technical equipment” had been employed—Lewis used almost none—and thought that the result had “only the most tenuous connection with the psalms.” This seems excessive, unless one insists upon advanced scholarship in any religious discussion; Lewis, precisely because he wrote as an amateur to amateurs, penetrated to the heart of the psalms.

Soon after completing
Reflections
, Lewis received an invitation from the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation of Atlanta, Georgia, to prepare some tape recordings for American broadcast. He agreed, indicating that he would talk about love in its assorted major forms, which “bring in nearly the whole of Christian ethics.” Lewis made the recordings in London on August 19–20, 1958, under the direction of the organization’s founder, Caroline Rakestraw, a formidable woman whose meddling manner irked both Lewis and Joy, the latter labeling her “insufferable” and the former christening her “Cartwheel,” a quasi-anagram, perhaps a reference to the contortions she tried to put him through. When Lewis resisted her editorial intrusions, which included an attempt to transform his direct “Today I want to discuss” into the hesitant “Let us think together, you and I,” she demanded that he “sit absolutely silent before the microphone for a minute and a half ‘so they could feel his living presence.’” Whether the sponsoring bishops enjoyed this moment of mystical communion is not recorded, but they vigorously objected to Lewis’s bold discussion of eros, the third love in his typology, and canned the series. Lewis, of course, immediately converted the tape recordings (which the foundation has since offered for sale as
Four Talks on Love)
into a book, which he completed in June 1959.

The Four Loves
sustains the avuncular tone of the recorded talks, as Lewis analyzes four forms of love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. The first three, arising in the natural order of things, may be beautiful or good but have the potential to be twisted into something ugly and destructive. Thus
storge
, or affection, the warm animal love between mother and child or dog and master, may become a tyrannous stranglehold, as Lewis explains in a passage that may reflect his experiences with Mrs. Moore: “If people are already unlovable a continual demand on their part (as of right) to be loved—their manifest sense of injury, their reproaches, whether loud and clamorous or merely implicit in every look and gesture of resentful self-pity—produce in us a sense of guilt (they are intended to do so) for a fault we could not have avoided and cannot cease to commit.” Friendship, too, may be perverted into exclusivity, yet it offers incomparable joys, as in Lewis’s glowing account of male friends gathering in an inn after a “hard day’s walking,” which doubles as an idealized portrait of the Inklings. “Those are the golden sessions … when our slippers are on, our feet spread out towards the blaze and our drinks at our elbows; when the whole world, and something beyond the world, opens itself to our minds as we talk; and … all are freemen and equals as if we had first met an hour ago, while at the same time an Affection mellowed by the years enfolds us. Life—natural life—has no better gift to give. Who could have deserved it?”

Eros, too, which binds two individuals together, transforming them into lover and beloved, harbors its deadly snares, such as obsession and uncontrolled passion. Charity, however, stands alone. Charity (
agape
) is supernatural, a sheer gift, “Love Himself working in a man.” It allows us to do what we would not ordinarily do: to embrace our enemies, kiss lepers, give away money, take on the sufferings of others. Through charity we draw close both to God and to our fellow human beings. Lewis rejects the idea, which he discerns in Augustine’s account of the loss of his friend Nebridius, that one must beware of creaturely love and embrace only God, who never dies; instead, he stands with Charles Williams (without mentioning him by name), arguing that human and divine love complement and complete one another, and that in the Beatific Vision, the culmination of charity, we will find our earthly beloveds in their completion and consummation, united in God.

The Four Loves
received predictable reviews, acclaimed by most religious periodicals and praised, a tad less fervently, by their secular counterparts. The Jesuit philosopher Fr. Martin D’Arcy (whose book
The Mind and Heart of Love
had been published in 1945 by T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber), writing in
The New York Times Book Review
, found Lewis’s categories rather “vague and fluid” but applauded the author for merging “a novelist’s insights into motives with a profound religious understanding”—a serviceable but bland comment that could apply equally well to any of Lewis’s apologetic works.