C. S. Lewis Remembered

Harry Lee Poe

• Publisher: Zondervan
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780310559894
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religious Biographies

What was it like to have C. S. Lewis as a teacher? Most people know C. S. Lewis through his writings, but in his lifetime he was first and foremost a teacher. Now those who were influenced by what they learned from his teaching offer a unique view of one of the most influential Christian writers of all time. What was it like to study under C. S. Lewis when he taught at Oxford and Cambridge? How did his influence and teaching create a legacy that has influenced educators since? C. S. Lewis Remembered is a collection of interviews and essays that offer personal perspectives on Lewis the teacher and Lewis the man. These recollections portray him in all his humanity: both the irascibility and the brilliance, both the ferocity of his intellectual precision and the eagerness of his curiosity. Some of this book's contributors chose to study with Lewis because of his Christian faith. Others admired him as a scholar but never shared Lewis's interest in religion. Still others shared his "mere Christianity" but differed with him over his Protestantism. But all of them came into contact with Lewis when they were young adults, whether they were students, colleagues, or those who knew him informally as a teacher. Many of them followed in his footsteps and became educators as well. Former students such as W. Brown Patterson, Peter Milward, and Peter Bayley talk about what it was like to study under Lewis. A recent lecture by Walter Hooper and essays by such noted scholars as Barbara Reynolds offer additional insight on Lewis and his influence. Also included are pieces by Lewis's godson, Lawrence Harwood; a transcript of an interview with Owen Barfield, a friend who knew Lewis from the time Lewis returned to Oxford after World War I and who played an important role in Lewis's shift from atheism to belief in God; and a hitherto unpublished sketch of Lewis by Mary Shelley Neylan. In addition, an article that appeared in SF Horizons, a magazine for science fiction fans, offers a transcript of a taped conversation between C. S. Lewis, Kingsley Amis, and Brian Aldiss.

Part 1: The Man

Before his death, C. S. Lewis named Owen Barfield as his literary executor. Barfield was one of Lewis’s first new friends in Oxford when he returned from the First World War. Barfield played an enormous role in the change of mind Lewis had about taking spiritual reality seriously. Lewis wrote about their discussions and disagreements, but also about what he learned through these discussions with Barfield. To be a great teacher, it is first necessary to love learning. Long before the term “lifelong learning” had come into vogue, Lewis practiced the life of learning. Early on, his friendship with Tolkien centered around learning Old Norse! Lewis even preferred to think of himself as a “learned man” rather than a “scholar.”

It is appropriate, then, that this volume begins with Owen Barfield. Barfield was interviewed at the first C. S. Lewis Summer Institute in 1988 by Kim Gilnett and Walter Hooper. The theme for the Conference was “The Christian and the Contemporary University.” The first chapter reflects the conversational style of an earlier day and gives a glimpse of Lewis the man from one who knew him well.

One of the last people on earth to make the acquaintance of C. S. Lewis was Walter Hooper, a young American graduate student. Hooper met Lewis that last summer before his death and helped him with his correspondence and related secretarial duties while Warren Lewis was away in Ireland. Hooper has probably had more to do than any other single individual with the continued interest in Lewis simply by virtue of the enormous editorial work he has undertaken to make available the short essays and sermons that Lewis produced over his lifetime. Though Hooper did not study formally with Lewis, he represents the vast reach of Lewis the teacher to the millions who have read his work.

Chapter 1: C. S. Lewis as Christian and Scholar

Owen Barfield

OWEN BARFIELD: I think the first thing I ought to do is to thank the administration for providing this magnificently comfortable armchair. It is so comfortable that if I fall asleep, you will know who to blame.

I’m not very clear, I have to confess, whether it’s old age or some other reason, exactly what I’m expected to do. But I have been told that there were likely to be a great many questions, and it occurs to me that as the time is not unlimited and there are quite a number of people here, perhaps it would be best, and I’m subject to correction here, perhaps it would be best if we confined ourselves to begin with questions which I will do my best to answer.

KIM GILNETT: You met Lewis in 1919. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the occasion of when you met Lewis?

BARFIELD: Oh. Yes. It’s not a tremendously dramatic one. I met Lewis through a friend. I was an undergraduate at Wadham College, and the man who became a friend was also an undergraduate there, Leo Baker, who was already acquainted with Lewis.¹ I don’t know in what connection, before either of them came to university. Leo Baker and I were both interested in reading and in writing poetry, and I think Lewis and Baker and another friend called Paisley were already planning to produce a collected volume of their poems. Anyhow, Baker introduced me to Lewis by the simple process of asking us both to tea. That was when I first met Lewis in the autumn of 1919. I have a very vivid recollection, which may have been distorted because it doesn’t altogether accord with my recollection of Lewis in later life. I recollect a rather lean young man, arriving on a bicycle at Wadham, looking a bit hungry. I think he was in those days. He wasn’t then at all well off. Now exactly what we talked about, because it was about sixty years ago, I couldn’t possibly tell you. It was certainly quite a number of subjects. What was already impressing me was Lewis’s acuteness, so to speak. He always had his eye on the ball. Whatever we were talking about, he would have something pointed and relevant about it to say. He never spoke in a hurry or slurred his words at all. There was a kind of eagerness behind his thinking that often does come out, and I’m afraid in my own case comes out, in rather hurried and inaudible diction. He had this eager mind, so to speak, shining through his eyes. Shining is such an excessive adjective, but it was there. And somehow I suppose we felt we had something in common, and after that we met occasionally on our own. Sometimes with Baker, sometimes on our own. Not frightfully often during that term; not tremendously often while we were still undergraduates. When we did meet most was after I had finished the doctorate and was living someplace very near, and he had then become a don at Magdalen. I would go in to see him or he would come up and see me, and we began a rather long and complicated argument of an epistemological nature about which a book has subsequently been published, called The Great War between C. S.Lewis and Owen Barfield [sic].²

GILNETT: Tell us a little more about that argument in which you had an impact on his thinking, particularly before Lewis became a Christian.

BARFIELD: I don’t know that this is a very appropriate venue to go into the philosophical details of the struggle, but I supposed it worked out, to put it as untechnically and briefly as possible, he was philosophically a materialist. He didn’t believe that any access to the spiritual or supernatural world was possible for the human mind, and that any human mind that supposed that it had such access was living in a world of fantasy. I took a different view. I thought that what had come to be called “imagination” at the time of the Romantic movement, and had been developed a good deal since, was a line of communication between the human mind and a mind in the universe that was immaterial. That’s the nearest I can get in a few words putting what the issue was between us, but it wasn’t as brief or as simple as that, because it led to a long correspondence. We used to correspond at intervals and also to meet and argue verbally, and then he wrote a long sort of treatise, you would call it, in Latin, intellectually reminiscent of Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, because it was Summa Contra Anthropophia, and I wrote a longish answer to it, and he wrote again, and that together with the correspondence was what was dealt with, I think skillfully and at a fair length, in the book I have mentioned. I don’t think I can carry it any further; otherwise we shall be here until approximately this time tomorrow.****************

WALTER HOOPER: I wonder, Owen, could you mention when you first met the household?

BARFIELD: Oh — the “household” is a curious word to use. All my other friends were undergraduates, either living in college rooms or else in diggings in the town of Oxford on their own or with friends. Lewis was already established in a house in Headington. The house was called Hillsborough at some little way from The Kilns. The owner of the house was a Mrs. Moore, who had a daughter, Maureen, but we didn’t see much of her because she was at school, mostly. He never said much about his domestic arrangements or about Mrs. Moore. It’s a little bit of a mystery who exactly Mrs. Moore was. After a time, in addition to having tea with him in Oxford, he asked me, and sometimes my friend Harwood, out to tea there and then, to begin with, we never met Mrs. Moore.³ But there was one incident that I know Walter Hooper will find particularly amusing. When Lewis and I were talking late at night in the living room of The Kilns — this is at The Kilns now — no, it wasn’t, this was at Hillsborough. At a certain stage in the conversation he would say, “Excuse me. I must go do Mrs. Moore’s jowls.” I had no idea what that was. It was only some years later that I discovered “jowls” was either the ordinary Irish name or Lewis’s name for Mrs. Moore’s hot water bottle. So he used to have to go up and put one or more hot water bottles in her bed. That was probably hisfunction. I gradually learned, I can’t remember at what stage, how it came about that he was living with Mrs. Moore, but he had a great friend who was in the army with him in the first war, and they had agreed that if either one of them were killed, the other one would look after the parents of the surviving one. And in that way he came to live with Mrs. Moore, help her along, more or less as a surrogate son, really. I think I might add in that connection, I know quite a lot and I have read quite a lot of what has been written about Mrs. Moore since Lewis’s death, a great deal of it very unfavorable, giving a very unfavorable impression of her. Now that may be not inaccurate as to the later years of her life, and I hardly ever saw her. She may have grown into perhaps a peevish old lady. At the time when I knew him then as an undergraduate and also for quite a number of years afterward, after I was married and my wife and I both used to go and visit them in The Kilns, my wife and I both had the impression that Mrs. Moore was really extremely good to these two brothers. By that time Warnie, his brother, was also living there, and she was extremely good to them, looking after them very well. I think I remember my wife saying on one occasion, “How she spoils those two!” I mention that to add a little balance to what you may have read about Mrs. Moore. She was not by any means only an ogre. Or ogress, I suppose I should say.

GILNETT: Was Warnie — Warnie had a difficult time with Mrs. Moore.

BARFIELD: I believe — I heard that. I wasn’t going there so often. I was living in London; I didn’t often hear, but I have heard, and I couldn’t express an opinion about how reliable that view or rumor is, whether they didn’t get on well or not.

GILNETT: Tell us a little more about Warnie. Obviously those brothers were together as much time as they could be. They were very close.

BARFIELD: Do you want more about Mrs. Moore, in connection with their both being together?

GILNETT: No. Actually, more about Warnie. Excuse me. Tell us a little more about Warren Lewis, the Major.

BARFIELD: It’s a very broad question: “a little more about” him. He was in the regular army — I think the Army Service Corp, wasn’tit? And I didn’t see anything of him at all for the first few years of my acquaintanceship with Lewis, and then he retired and came and lived in Oxford. He had a room in Magdalen. He was there every day. He always came into Lewis’s room and spent the day there, and he spent all his time with a typewriter, typing out this enormous history of the family, the Lewis family, incorporating all sorts of letters and documents. He also used to attend the meetings of the little group they called “the Inklings,” which met every week in Lewis’s room. I only went once in a dozen times when I wasn’t living in Oxford. He and Lewis used to go for little walks, little walking tours together. His range of interest was certainly different from his brother’s in many ways, although they were so close together. Warnie Lewis hated philosophy. He couldn’t stand anything to do with it, and how he managed in spite of that to enjoy attending the Inklings, I don’t know, but he did. But he was, in many ways, a thoroughly well-educated man. He wrote several books. His particular interest was life at the time of Louis XIV in France. He wrote four or five books which were really quite successful on that topic, but I didn’t see him all that often.⁴ He used to — at that time, my friend Harwood and I very often visited those two together, and Lewis’s brother Warnie got in the habit of calling us “the Barwood.”

GILNETT: I remember reading a letter that was written to you in 1929 from Lewis that indicated — this was right during the time he was considering the Christian faith — in which he said something to the effect — and I have to paraphrase — that the spirit is taking the offensive, and that if you didn’t get up to see him soon, he may be checked into a monastery.

BARFIELD: I brought that letter. It’s very short. I think I’ve got the right one. I won’t read the whole letter, but:

Terrible things are happening to me. The “Spirit” or real “I” is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal, and is taking the offensive and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest, or you might find me in a monastery.⁵

I don’t think I went. I wrote to him, but I don’t remember that I went on. That, of course, was the beginning of his conversion. That’s alsowhen he writes in Surprised by Joy how reluctant he was to be converted. There was never a more reluctant convert or unhappy Christian, probably, than he was that evening.

GILNETT: It was to affect his academic life later on, the becoming a Christian, and he did a number of things: broadcast talks, and speaking to the RAF. There was an article that came out, and I can’t remember who wrote the article, but it indicated that Lewis did those things because his conscience required him to do that. Is that your impression, that he felt like he was called to go out and speak, to write, to do the broadcast talks, something he didn’t like to do?

BARFIELD: Yes, I never discussed it with him or asked him, but I would think that was so, that as a writer he wouldn’t have chosen to write the sort of things he wrote — the broadcast talks that became Mere Christianity — but his Christianity was essentially one of action. It comes out a good deal in his private correspondence with people who wrote to him because of his Christian apologetic books. He would always rather warn them against thinking that religion meant having fine, warm feelings. You ought to do what you were called upon to do, what you felt it was your duty to do. You know the text, “The one that says, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will not inherit the kingdom of heaven, but he that doeth the will of my Father.” I think that was essentially the leading thread, if that’s the right word, in Lewis’s Christian faith, or Christian experience. And I would think that he did all that writing of the apologetic nature not primarily because he enjoyed it. Though I think when he began to write he would always enjoy it, because he enjoyed putting things well, and he put them so well. But I think you are probably right, if you suggested it, that he wouldn’t have chosen that simply for information. It would have an element of doing his duty in it.

HOOPER: I wonder, Owen, if you would tell them about the setting up of the Agape Files.

BARFIELD: Oh, that’s getting into the legal technicalities. Of course, when he and I were undergraduates, and for many years after, we were both writing and even publishing books. It didn’t mean anything in financial terms. Then he turned out Screwtape Letters, which sold like hotcakes, and after that he continued writing booksat what appeared to me to be kind of breakneck speed. I could hardly believe — and to my even greater surprise, they sold. So he began to get quite large sums of money coming in. Well, he was earning quite a decent salary as an English literature teacher at Magdalen. He really didn’t need all the money, so he used to give it away. And what he did was, he’d write to a publisher and say, “Send the next lot of royalties to the Home for the Benefit of Cats,” or something of that kind. And after that had been going on for a year or two, I suppose in connection with his ordinary income tax, he would consult an accountant. The accountant pointed out to him that all these things he’d given away, although he’d given it away and he’d never seen the money, since he had acquired the right to the money and had parted with it, it was counted for tax purposes as his income. At that time there was an income tax on the lower level of income and also a surtax at a very high rate on larger sums. And it was worked out that he had probably now incurred a liability to income tax and surtax, which would absorb not only any royalty he had earned but also his ordinary salary. Certainly if he went on doing that, it would very quickly do so. So — the English tax laws and the American laws are a bit different. I can’t go into all that, but I know in American law you can give your money away to charity and get it all deducted for income tax. You can’t quite do that in England. If you wanted to make a donation to charity and not have to pay income tax on it, you had to enter into what’s called a “Deed of Covenant,” by which you agree to pay so much every year to charity concerns. And when you pay that, you deduct tax from it and in that way you save yourself the tax. The charity then goes back to the Revenue and recovers the tax you have deducted. It’s all very complicated. Anyhow, we decided that he’d better do that. So he appointed me the trustee of his charitable trust and all royalties were paid to me and were distributed as he directed, for charity or for charitable purposes, not necessarily to an institutional charity, but a poor man who hadn’t enough money to educate his children, and so forth. All sorts of personal cases came his way, either through friends or otherwise. I even suggested the name for this — “Agapargyry” — agape being the Greek name for charity and argyrion the name for money. And that’s how we always referred to it: “Agapargyry” for a while or just “Agapod”, or even “the Ag,” as we used to call it sometimes. Now and then I’d get a line from him saying, “Send so much to so-and-so. I just heard from him that his wife’s got cancer.” That went on for many years. But of course, there again, I had to advise him to only dispose of two-thirds of his income in that way, because he still had to pay tax, of course, on his salary. And there was some question of surtax, as I say, but that’s getting into technical detail we needn’t go into, but that was the substance of it — just setting out of a charitable deed. (It also helped donations, for people to make donations. They could enter into a Deed of Covenant to pay me, the trustee, so much for, it used to be s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword by Simon Barrington-Ward
• Part 1: The Man
• Part 2: The Teacher
• Part 3: The Personal Influence
• Appendix: The Establishment Must Die and Rot . . .
• Walking Again on Addison’s Walk
• NOTES
• Contributors
• About The Publisher
• Share Your Thoughts