SSixty years after the death of CS Lewis, his bibliography remains a formidable reference for anyone aspiring to the title of “Christian public intellectual”. But few people know that much of this work was written under circumstances that should have made the production of a work of importance impossible. For his public, he was the great “Mr. Louis.” » At home, it was a different story, as his life was spent caring for a woman who did not appreciate his vocation at all.
Lewis first met Janie King Moore when he was a very young man training for war, with his son, Paddy. The two future soldiers promised each other that they would take care of each other’s single parents if one of them died in combat. Young Lewis was attracted to Mrs. Moore, a spirited and motherly Irish woman who was separated from her husband. When Paddy died, Lewis didn’t just look after his friend’s mother. He started keeping house with her.
This is generally the “huge and complex episode” that Lewis refuses to dwell on in his memoirs. Surprised by joy. For decades, biographers were divided over the precise nature of this particular relationship. AN Wilson believed that young Lewis’ letters contained enough subtle clues to shift the burden of proof to researchers who believed the living conditions were non-sexual. It was only after the recent death of Lewis’s secretary, Walter Hooper, that conclusive evidence emerged, as confirmed by Lewis’ attorney and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield. In Hooper’s words, “Owen Barfield told me that yes, Lewis had told him that there had been a sexual relationship and that it really started at that time, right after he got out of the army. “
This revelation should not have shocked Lewis’s attentive readers, whose letters hardly portray his younger self as a model of sexual morality. Moreover, his early disdain for “religion” was said to have been something he shared with Mrs. Moore, who was at best indifferent, at worst hostile to Christianity. It’s not hard to imagine how these two lost souls could have formed a codependent entanglement: the woman without a man in her life, the man without a woman.
But young Lewis would eventually find himself on his knees, reluctantly becoming a theist, in his rooms at Magdalen College. According to Alastair McGrath’s calculations, this was the same year that Lewis and Mrs Moore moved into the famous Kilns. There was a connecting door between their bedrooms, the only way Lewis could access the rest of the house without going out the window. Nevertheless, he chose to build an emergency exit and lock the connecting door. It will remain closed until Mrs. Moore’s death.
As far as we know, Ms. Moore never abandoned her ingrained anti-Christian prejudices. As his affection for Lewis turned into a very demanding possessiveness, it became a constant waste of his time and energy. We get a glimpse of what he quietly endured through his collected correspondence with his close friends and confidants. He always writes with the warmth and seriousness that characterize him, without ever complaining, only asking for prayer. Sometimes he tells them that the house is doing well, and sometimes he frankly admits that things are “pretty bad.” For better or for worse, this is the shape of his life. Her prayer requests for Mrs. Moore are particularly tender and tinged with sadness. “Pray for Jane,” he wrote to his longtime correspondent, Sister Penelope. “She’s the old lady I call my mother and who I live with. . . an unbeliever, sick, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in many other senses. And there’s not much I can do for her.
By the end of the decade, Lewis was so overwhelmed by his “duties as a nurse and servant” that he had to refuse an invitation to discuss the future of the Church with the archbishops of Canterbury and York. In 1949, he confided to a friend that he feared that his wellspring of creativity would dry up and that he might never write another book. Yet he found his peace in God’s will: “If it please God that I write more books, blessed be He.” If he doesn’t like it, again, bless him.
This year will prove to be a Annus horribilis for Lewis. In Barfield, he candidly described a typical day marked by “dog feces and human vomit.” (Mrs. Moore required that he walk his dog every few hours.) Further adding to his burden was his alcoholic brother Warnie’s frequent “binges.” Under the stress, his immune system weakened and he became so dangerously ill with the flu that he had to be hospitalized for several days.
And yet, impossibly, at the end of this horrible year, Lewis would finish two Narnia chronicles and begin a third. By the time The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was published, Ms. Moore had gone to a nursing home. This caused Lewis great financial anxiety. Normally such a successful author would not worry about money, but Lewis had chosen to place all his royalties in a charitable foundation managed by Owen Barfield. In the meantime, he visited daily the woman he called his mother. Sometimes she complained about wanting to go home, sometimes she was just “childish and incoherent.” Sometimes she recognized him, sometimes not. Whatever his state of mind, his presence was his fixed point.
His stay was not prolonged. Janie King Moore died of pneumonia on January 12, 1951. She was buried in the same cemetery where Lewis would join her twelve years later, almost fifteen years younger than she was at the time of her death.
Lewis’s letters from this period are marked by deep, discreet relief. He wrote to a frequent correspondent that he was just beginning to understand in retrospect “how bad it was.” And yet, even if we miss the works he might have written under different circumstances, we might also wonder whether the books we have would have been the same if duty had not forced him to die to himself every day for the good of a fragile and impossible being. old woman. In the end, his own words seemed as true for himself as for everyone: “Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want.” . »
Bethel McGrew is an essayist and social critic.
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Image of Miossec assumed via Creative Commons. Cropped image.
