The Long Decline

“Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.”

— Galatians 6:2, KJV

The Hardest Years

The years just after the Second World War were, in public, the summit of Lewis’s fame. In private they were among the hardest of his life. He was exhausted by the war years, in which he had taught, lectured, written, broadcast and travelled without a break. The household at the Kilns was growing more difficult. And the two people he lived with were both, in different ways, falling apart.

Mrs Moore

Janie Moore was in her seventies. She suffered from varicose ulcers in her legs, and she grew steadily less able to move about. She also grew more demanding, more anxious and more querulous. She quarrelled with the maids, worried about everything, and wanted Jack at hand constantly. Visitors to the Kilns in those years remembered seeing Lewis called from his work or his conversation, again and again, to deal with some small domestic crisis: a dog that needed walking, a maid who had given notice, a message, a cup of tea. Warnie’s diary from these years is full of fury at her, and at what he saw as her tyranny over his brother.

Lewis did not complain, at least not often. His letters to friends sometimes speak of the pressure of the household, and he asked one or two close correspondents for their prayers, without going into detail. To most people he said nothing at all. He nursed her, fetched and carried for her, and listened to her. He seems to have thought that this was simply his duty, and that the duty did not lessen because it had become hard.

Warnie

Warnie, meanwhile, was drinking. He had always enjoyed a drink, as most army officers of his generation did, but in the years after the war his drinking became something else. He would go on binges that lasted days or weeks, often when he was away from home or under strain, and he would sometimes end in hospital. In the summer of 1947, on holiday in Ireland, he drank himself into such a state that he was taken into Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital at Drogheda, run by an order of Irish nuns, the Medical Missionaries of Mary. Jack crossed to Ireland to be with him. The nuns nursed Warnie back to health, then and on many later occasions, and he grew deeply attached to them.

Lewis never wrote publicly about his brother’s alcoholism, and he rarely wrote of it privately. He did not lecture or reproach him, at least not in any record that survives. He worried, prayed, fetched him home, and forgave him. The brothers’ love for each other never wavered. But Warnie’s drinking added greatly to the strain of Jack’s life, and there were times when Jack, who depended on his brother more than anyone, could not depend on him at all.

June 1949

In June 1949 Lewis collapsed. He had been working without a holiday for years, he was run down, and he picked up a serious streptococcal infection. He was rushed into the Acland nursing home in Oxford, where he was treated with injections of the new drug penicillin. His doctor, Robert Havard, told Warnie that his brother was dangerously exhausted and needed a complete rest. Warnie, under the strain, began drinking heavily again.

Lewis recovered, but slowly. His friends began to worry seriously about him. Some of them felt that the burden of the household at the Kilns was killing him, and one or two said so. But Lewis would not hear of changing the arrangement. He had made a promise, and he would keep it.

Restholme

In April 1950 the decision was taken out of his hands. Mrs Moore, by then seventy-eight, after a series of falls, could no longer be cared for at home. She was moved to a nursing home in Oxford called Restholme. Lewis visited her almost every day for the rest of her life, often travelling across Oxford in the middle of a heavy working day to sit with her. She was often confused, and the visits cannot always have been easy. He went anyway.

She died on 12 January 1951, of influenza, at the age of seventy-eight. She was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity, Headington Quarry, where Jack would one day lie as well. Lewis had kept his promise to Paddy Moore for more than thirty years.

Relief and Grief

What Lewis felt at her death he did not say publicly. To friends he admitted a kind of relief, as anyone who has nursed a long illness will understand, and also real grief. She had been the centre of his household for half his life. She had given him a home when he had none, and whatever else the relationship had been, it had been long and close. Warnie, on the other hand, recorded his relief without any mixture at all. The house became, for a few years, quieter.

Passed Over

In these same years Lewis suffered a series of disappointments in his career. He was by now, by any reasonable measure, one of the most distinguished literary scholars in Oxford, the author of The Allegory of Love and of a stream of other learned work, and the best-attended lecturer in the English faculty. Yet he was never offered a professorship at Oxford. More than once he was passed over for a chair he might reasonably have expected. In 1951 he was a candidate for the elected post of Professor of Poetry, and lost to the poet Cecil Day-Lewis.

Some of his colleagues frankly disapproved of him. They thought that a scholar who wrote popular books about religion, spoke on the radio and was on the cover of an American magazine was not quite respectable. Some were offended by his outspoken faith. Others simply disliked his personality, which could be loud and overbearing in the common room. Lewis felt the slights, but he did not complain about them in public, and there is little bitterness about them in his letters. He had, by then, learned something about humility, and something about not needing the good opinion of the people around him.

The Law of Christ

The verse at the head of this chapter tells Christians to bear one another’s burdens. Lewis bore a great many in these years: an old woman’s decline, a brother’s drinking, a heavy load of teaching, and the letters of thousands of strangers. He did it, for the most part, without being thanked and without telling anyone. It nearly broke his health. But it was in these years, when his life was at its most constricted, that he began to write the books that would carry his name furthest of all.