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The Grief of C. S. Lewis

By Ann Loades

"Men must endure their going hence."-Shakespeare, King Lear, Act V, Sc. 2.

IT IS EASY to understand why C. S. Lewis's A Grief Observed is one of his least read books.¹ Agonizingly clear, it reveals all too forcefully our vulnerability to grief, our anger at the way things go. It puts us in touch with powerful and unmanageable emotion, reminds us of our necessary interdependence on one another, and the cost of loving. For a Christian believer, it can evoke ultimate nightmare; for the conclusion of his reflections which Lewis dreaded was not that there was no God after all, but that God was a "cosmic sadist," that "this is what God's really like."

We need to read this text, to realize our vulnerability, and we need our powerful emotions to give us the energy to change what can be changed for the better, or mourning is not "blessed"; and we need that energy to try to change or at least to mitigate what at first sight may seem to be hopeless. And we can neither manage to live, or to, die at peace, if we cover ourselves with a glaze of metaphorical ice, crippled by the fear of rejection, or living with a fantasy of divine power which will operate to protect us from the hurts integral to our shared inheritance in the natural processes of the world.

If we experiment with isolation and fear, sooner or later we arrive, as Lewis saw, at the point of realizing not love but nightmare. "So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer." There is some link between wasted effort in the wrong direction, aiming at sentimentality and self-deception, and the "god" Lewis seemed for a time to encounter in his grief. To read him is to learn how he shook himself free, as well as putting in place, as it were, one of the interlocking pieces of his writing.

Ann Loades is Professor of Theology at Durham University, England. In the Fall semester of 1988, she was Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Luther College, Decorah, Iowa. This article on C. S. Lewis was originally prepared for an international conference on literature and religion held last April at Hatfield College, Durham University.

¹C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 1961 (London: Faber, 1985), first published anonymously, no doubt to protect himself from being inundated with yet more correspondence, and of a profoundly stressful kind, while publishing to help others. "H" in the text is the initial of Helen, his wife's first name; and N. W. Clerk (himself as author) was a pseudonym he had used before for short pieces, derived from an Anglo-Saxon phrase meaning "I know not whom" and "clerk"-one able to read and write. Also, see C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 1955 (London: Fount, 1977); The Four Loves, 1960 (London: Fount, 1987); Letters to Malcolm, 1964 (London: Bles, 1964).

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I

A Grief Observed is closely connected with other Lewis texts, such as the first chapter of Surprised by Joy (1955), his first exercise in being "suffocatingly subjective" in print; the last chapter of The Four Loves (1960); and Letters to Malcolm (published in 1964, after Lewis's own death). And perhaps one of the best routes into A Grief Observed is not now through the many fine books about Lewis' writing on religion, or even the biographies, but by way of his younger stepson's new book, Lenten Lands.² Douglas H. Gresham writes about himself, not primarily about his mother and his step-father, but the first photograph in the book is of the plaque C. S. Lewis had inscribed for his wife Joy at Headington Crematorium, Oxford:

Here the whole world (stars, water, air,
And field, and forest, as they were
Reflected in a single mind)
Like cast off clothes was left behind
In ashes, yet with hope that she,
Re-born from holy poverty,
In lenten lands, hereafter may
Resume them on her Easter Day.

The disintegration of Joy's first marriage, her conversion to Christianity, and the fact that she, like all too many others, began a correspondence with C. S. Lewis (Jack), was to lead to a desire to meet him. Eventually, she took along her two boys to the Lewis household which included not only Jack, but his older brother, "Warnie." Joy and her two boys were recipients of Jack's financial help and immensely practical compassion, and in Joy both of the men found a kind of match. Warnie had recognized her exceptional qualities of imagination and intellect in her very first letter to Jack, for whom he handled the bulk of the mountain of correspondence. Turning that first letter over to Jack, there began an exploration of each other's wits by a correspondence that was to flower, first, into friendship, and, then, into love and marriage. The two men were devoted to each other, Warnie being the older brother tender enough to the younger to share in many of his doings. He had provided Jack with the occasion for the first of his experiences of joyous divine presence, by making him a tiny garden in a biscuit tin, and filling it with moss, stones, twigs, and tiny flowers.³ Warnie himself was as emotionally vulnerable as Jack, and in adult life was to seek anodyne in alcohol when pain threatened too strongly. Warnie had been a professional soldier; Jack's war experience had interrupted only for a short time his progress toward the life of a bachelor "don," in which most, if not all important human relationships would be exclusively made with

²Douglas H. Gresham, Lenten Lands (New York: Macmillan, 1988).

³George Sayer, Jack: C S. Lewis and his Times (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988) p. 21.

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men, though in Jack's case at least, his delight in beauty embraced not only text and rhythm, landscape and garden, but feminine beauty, too.

The Greshams were meeting a pair of men bereaved of their own mother when very young, a bereavement that had hit Jack particularly hard, for he had grown closer to his mother when Warnie had been packed off to "prep" school like other little boys, into a state of misery soon to be endured for a time by Jack. Kept away from their mother during the time of her dying (she died on his father's birthday in 1908), Jack was taken in to see her dead body and was always to associate death with ugliness.

Enlisting as a volunteer in the British Army, he had arrived in the battle area on his nineteenth birthday, causing further stress to his bereaved father, who had in 1908 lost not only his wife but his own father and a brother. The emotional havoc of the ten-year period before and during the war led to further estrangement between the Lewis boys and their father (who died in 1929), not least because both the sons had to endure their own memories of combat, wounds, and the unburied corpses gradually mashed into the "no-man's land" of the battlefields. The Lewis household which the Greshams came to know had, in 1950, lost Mrs. Moore, the mother of one of Jack's friends killed in action. She was the last of a series of "mothers," who had included a nursemaid for the small boys in their first home, while their mother was still alive, and the school "matron" of one of his better schools, a woman who generously demonstrated her affection to the boys in her charge, especially those who had been orphaned. Mrs. Moore became Jack's second "mother" whether his brother and his friends liked it or not, but her death freed the two men to secure their relationship with one another again. So it was this household that the Gresham boys were to visit in 1953, and only two years later, they came to live a mile or so away.

Then Jack married Joy in a "civil" ceremony on April 23, 1956, to secure her residence rights in England, though Douglas is clear that Jack had at least been thinking about marriage when he had extracted himself from Oxford by accepting a professorship at Cambridge in 1954, saying to the boy that he had to consider the salary if he was thinking of marriage and acquiring two children into the bargain.

At eleven years old, Douglas was visiting his mother in hospital with terminal cancer, then meandered round the cemetery of Headington Quarry's Holy Trinity Church. There Douglas was given the knowledge that if he felt he really could not live without his mother, all he had to do was ask that she be spared, for the time being. Praying in the church, he felt the immense comfort and security that she would be spared. Lewis himself was to write about what happened in an essay on the efficacy of prayer,⁴ not knowing of his step-son's experience. In his essay, he avoided any direct identification of himself, Joy, or the priest who was to

⁴C. S. Lewis, Fernseeds and Elephants (London: Fountain, 1977).

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help them so much, Peter Bide. The latter came to visit Joy at a stage when the nurses gave her little time to live, when she had a thigh bone eaten through with cancer, thriving colonies of the disease in other bones, and needing three people to move her in bed. "A good man laid his hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, through rough woodland)". with bones miraculously restored to solidity. Lewis and Douglas had independently discovered a connection of prayer with courage, for Lewis went on to get across to his readers that if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, we had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. Strength gets less tender treatment. It is the brave who are sent, with far less help, to defend outposts in the battle. Acutely aware of the dangers of doing so, it was almost inevitable that Lewis himself would reflect on the Passion narratives of the Gospels during the time of Joy's long drawn-out dying, both the horrors of Gethsemane-she just conceivably might be spared, against all apparent probability⁵- and the sheer physical torture of crucifixion, as in The Four Loves, ⁶ where he writes of the buzzing flies, a flayed back pressed against the stake, nails through the nerves, and body hitching itself up to fight suffocation.

Peter Bide performed a religious ceremony of marriage for them in hospital, and Joy came home not to die immediately, but to live. Jack himself now suffered from osteoporosis, and his own pain became a substitution for hers on at least one occasion, taking her pain from her while her drugs took effect.

Transforming home and garden, Joy represented for Lewis everything he could have hoped for in the "carnival of sexuality" of his "entire marriage," reconciling what he called the sword between the sexes.⁷ This very "masculine" man offered to his reader remarks which reveal his own transcendence of some of the disastrous "gender" distinctions which have characterized Christian culture, though a woman might well blanch to find that for her husband she was daughter, mother, pupil and teacher, subject and sovereign, and always, "holding all these in solution," his trusty comrade, friend, shipmate, fellow-soldier. She was his mistress, but all that any of his men friends had ever been to him, perhaps more. "If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal. That's what I meant when I once praised her for her 'masculine virtues.' But she soon put a stop to that by asking how I'd like to be praised for my feminine ones." And, "Solomon calls his bride Sister. Could a woman be a complete wife unless, for a moment, in one particular mood, a man felt almost inclined to call her Brother?" He thought it arrogance in men to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry "masculine" when seen in a woman, and arrogance

⁵Malcolm, p. 62.

⁶Four Loves p. 116.

⁷Grief pp. 41-43.

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in women to describe a man's sensitiveness, tact, or tenderness, "feminine." But as Lewis observes, "what poor, warped fragments of humanity most mere men and mere women must be to make the implications of that arrogance plausible." His writing is a revealing commentary on what could yet be made of the "image of God" in humankind.

Joy's death was to precipitate Douglas into his stepfather's arms on arrival home from boarding school, breaking up at least for once some part of the pattern that had begun to develop after Lewis' own mother's death, a pattern of "anti-sentimental inhibition." Part of that pattern had in a way simply been repeated, for Douglas had been away at boarding school while his mother was dying, bereaved of her presence as Lewis had been before his own mother's death. In Douglas' case, school had to some extent freed him from his mother's and step-father's pain, and her death meant at last relief from waking up with dread, some minimal compensation for his grief and loss. Lewis own grief was exorcized in part by writing, and Douglas sees his love for his mother as the climax of everything Lewis' earthly life had led up to, with life after Joy's death "merely an exercise in patience and obedience.⁸ To have found her so late, and to have lost her through such agony would make immeasurable demands on a person's resources. Few would have had the talent to write it out in such a way as to help others.

II

A Grief Observed is scrupulously honest in laying bare Lewis' hell of grief, for which none of his earlier experiences had quite prepared him, with little resource to be found in his own reasoned defense of the thoroughly unpalatable Christian tradition of "perfection through suffering." He knew, of course, that Joy's death was churning up in him all the highly charged memories of his past, with himself ending up forever on the wrong side of a door slammed shut (which he had helped slam shut?), the road blocked by a frontier post, the iron curtain, vacuum, absolute zero, hanging on to ropes that broke as he seized them, bereft of the sense of the divine presence.

He had said at the time of his conversion, believing (of course) that "right" was before "might," that "if you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, 'I am.' To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him,"⁹ And he would support that in his comment on Psalm 22, and his recognition there of the union in Christ of "total privation with total adherence to God, to a God who makes no response."¹⁰ It was another to find faith at a level appropriate to himself, to go on believing that there was a Listener to his prayers who would

⁸Lenten Lands, p. x.

⁹Surprised, p. 185.

¹⁰C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (London: Fontana, 1-61) p. 106.

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take them into account when the silence seemed so emphatic, banging on the door of heaven for earthly comfort when he knew that it was not to be supplied there.¹¹

Douglas had come to the point of realizing that he was, after the initial respite, able to cope without his mother, but he, after all, had a young man's future on the immediate horizon. Lewis, on the other hand, had loved a wife with a mind "lithe and quick and muscular as a leopard,"¹² who was splendid, like a straight, bright, tempered sword ;¹³ like a nest of gardens, "wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered."¹⁴ Her palate for the joys of life had been unspoiled, a sign of the way God shares something with human creatures in a blessing of the body that is unshared with the intelligence of the angels. ¹⁵ Yet she had been taken from Lewis as though by a "spiteful imbecile,"¹⁶ and if God has all the characteristics we regard as bad-unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty, then God as God can be sponged off the slate, reality is meaningless, and there's no point in trying to think about anything, so far as Lewis was concerned. But, on the other hand, who had thought of baits like love, laughter, daffodils, or a frosty sunset? Lewis extricated himself from his horror just in time. He stopped trying to call her back like a kind of Lazarus, always Lewis' prime example of a man who had a rawer deal than Stephen, traditionally the first martyr.

III

Lewis reached the point where he practiced her absence, rather than go on pleading for her presence, in a world scoured clean of her. He received, as he had found after the death of his father, and of his beloved friend Charles Williams, an extraordinary sense of her presence, "an extreme and cheerful intimacy," bracing and restorative, full of resolution, of a no-nonsense kind.¹⁷ The key to this recovery was praise as a mode of loving, of God as giver, and of her as the gift. "Don't we in praise somehow enjoy what we praise, however far we are from it?"¹⁸ And in praising God and in praying for his own dear dead he might yet again enjoy God, as well as her.¹⁹

Here Lewis may seem to risk a different kind of shipwreck from that of confronting his "cosmic sadist." The desire to make the vulnerable invulnerable has received powerful philosophical and religious expression

¹¹Malcolm, p. 290.

¹²Grief, p. 6.

¹³Ibid., p. 37.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 53.

¹⁵Ibid., p. 16; Malcolm p. 29; and see C. S. Lewis, Poems, ed. W. Hooper (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1964) pp. 34-35, "Angelic minds, they say, by simple intelligence."

¹⁶Grief, p. 27.

¹⁷Ibid., pp. 56,63.

¹⁸Ibid., p. 53.

¹⁹Malcolm, p. 138.

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in Western Christian culture. If the last entry in The Four Loves is to be trusted, Lewis and his wife had come to a shared understanding about the place their love had in relation to the love which is God, believing that only those into whom Love Himself had entered would ascend to Love Himself. "In my love for wife or friend the only eternal element is the transforming presence of Love Himself. By that presence, if at all, the other elements may hope, as our physical bodies hope, to be raised from the dead. For this only is holy in them, this only is the Lord."²⁰

Bereavement forces us to try to believe what we cannot feel, that God is our true Beloved. Lewis wrote of the duty of turning away from our earthly Beloveds. In heaven, he claimed, we would be free of such anguish and such duty, because we should already have turned from portrait to original, from rivulets to fountain, from lovable creatures, to Love Himself, where we should find them all in him. "By loving Him more than them we shall love them more than we do now."²¹ So, in A Grief Observed, he turns from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith, to the live-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.

Gregory Vlastos has written of the roots of this doctrine in Plato, who does not provide for love of whole persons, "but only for love of that abstract version of persons which consists of the complex of their best qualities, as these reflect the sublime transcendence of the Idea of Beauty ." Since persons in their concreteness are thinking, feeling, wishing, hoping, fearing beings, to think of love for them as love for objectifications of excellence is to fail to make the thought of them as subjects central to what is felt for them in love," love for whom requires above all, imaginative sympathy and concern for what they themselves think, feel, and want. Plato, Vlastos argues, has missed that dimension of love in which tolerance, trust, forgiveness, tenderness, and respect have validity. ²²

This "Platonism" is mediated in Western Christianity by Dante's love for his Beatrice and is crucial for understanding the last lines of A Grief Observed, for Joy is Lewis' sharp-tongued, witty, and intellectual Beatrice. In The Divine Comedy, before Bernard of Clairvaux can introduce Dante to Mary, supremely the grace-filled creature, Dante has

²⁰Four Loves, p. 124.

²¹Four Loves, p. 127.

²²Gregory Vlastos, "Plato: the Individual as an Object of Love," in Ted Honderich ed., Philosophy Through its Past (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) pp. 33-34. And see the "Prayer for a fiancée or wife" by Temple Gairdner (1873-1928) before his marriage, in G. Appleton ed., The Oxford Book of Prayer (Oxford, 1985) p. 114. "That I may come near to her, draw me nearer to thee than to her; that I may know her, make me to know thee more than her; that I may love her with the perfect love of a perfectly whole heart, cause me to love thee more than her and most of all. Amen. Amen. That nothing may be between me and her, be thou between us, every moment. That we may be constantly together, draw us into separate loneliness with thyself, And when we meet breast to breast, my God, let it be on thine own. Amen. Amen."

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to take leave of Beatrice, his own symbol of grace. "From bondage into freedom you led me/by all those paths, by using all those means/which were within the limits of your power./Preserve in me your great munificence/so that my soul which you have healed may be/pleasing to you when it slips from the flesh.²³Then, specially applicable to Lewis' text, "So I prayed; and she, so far away/As she appeared, smiled and regarded me;/Then turned away to the eternal fountain." Lewis at her deathbed is not sharing Joy's vision. "She smiled, but not at me. Then turned away to the eternal fountain.²⁴

Yet the language of The Divine Comedy, however much it might seem at first sight to edge Lewis away from the lived experience of Joy in all her particularity, is to be seen simply as one of his ways of praising her, expressing his love for her, naturally drawing on language which was as much part of him as those earlier allusions to the Song of Songs. Perhaps none of his writing is more self-revealing than those paragraphs in which he unashamedly admits that her absence came home to him where he could not avoid it, in his own body, which had had such a different importance while it was the body of her lover. "What does it matter now whether my cheek is rough or smooth?" They had together feasted on love, on every mode of it. "No cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied ."²⁵ And this feast of love was to illustrate what "raised in incorruption" might mean, risking as he admitted, both mockery and misunderstanding in trying to explain how he thought life could be raised by God from death. "The strangest discovery of a widower's life is the possibility, sometimes, of recalling with detailed and uninhibited imagination, with tenderness and gratitude, a passage of carnal love, yet with no re-awakening of concupiscence. And when this occurs (it must not be sought), awe comes upon us. It is like seeing Nature itself rising from its grave."²⁶ For his own immediate future, he had his own share of poverty in Lenten lands to bear. "Men must endure their going hence" was the Shakespearean motto for August 23, Lewis' father's birthday, ²⁷ and would serve as a motto for his own last few years.

²³Using Mark Musa's Penguin Classics translation of Dante: The Divine Comedy, 111, Canto xxxi, 85-90.

²⁴Musa has at this point, "Such was my prayer. And she, so far away,/or so it seemed, looked down on me and smiled;/then to Eternal light she turned once more." Theologically appropriate, this loses the thread of connection to the Plotinian imagery of the overflowing fountain.

²⁵Grief, pp. 7, 9.

²⁶Malcolm, p. 152.

²⁷W. H. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis (London: Bles, 1966) p. 7.