It is not wrong to say that America made C.S. Lewis. Lewis’s 1942 book The Screwtape Letters was popular in Britain but was initially rejected by American publishers until Macmillan took a chance on it in 1943. It was a huge success. Macmillan quickly brought out his The Problem of Pain and The Case for Christianity (collecting Lewis’s popular BBC talks), as well as his sci-fi novel Out of the Silent Planet. Lewis was put on the cover of Time in 1947.
It has been mostly American readers (and his late American literary executor) who have kept his name in print since his death in 1963. And it has been mostly American institutions who have protected his legacy. Lewis’s personal library and much of his archive can be found at Wheaton College’s Wade Center outside Chicago. His home near Oxford is owned and run as a study center by the C.S. Lewis Society of California.
Yet, while Lewis may be indebted to America (a country he never visited) for his fame, he owes Oxford much more, Simon Horobin argues in C.S. Lewis’s Oxford. Both the town and the university shaped his mind and imagination in profound ways.
When Lewis first visited Oxford in 1916 to take university entrance exams, the 18-year-old from Belfast wrote his father: "The place has surpassed my wildest dreams. I never saw anything so beautiful, especially on these frosty moonlight nights." He moved there the following year, and other than a year in France during the First World War, he lived in Oxford for the rest of his life, making only one trip outside the U.K. after the war—to Greece with his wife, Joy Davidman, in 1960.
There is not much that is new in Horobin’s account of Lewis’s life in Oxford, but the benefit of focusing on his relationship to the places and people of the town is that it puts his everyday life in high relief. After taking a double First (the highest grade possible) in 1922 and another First in English in 1923—and after a one-year stint as a philosophy tutor—Lewis was elected a Fellow in English at Magdalen College in 1925. He was a member of the college for the next 29 years.
Life on campus was busy and intellectually invigorating. Lewis gave 24 hours of tutorials every week in addition to regular lectures (the standard at Oxbridge today is 8) and filled the rest of his schedule with literary and philosophical clubs. The most famous, of course, was the Inklings, which was actually two clubs—the more famous meeting on Tuesday mornings at the Eagle and Child pub for pre-lunch beers and the other meeting on Thursday evenings in Lewis’s rooms at Oxford. Members would read and critique each other’s work and discuss theological questions. J.R.R. Tolkien recalled that Lewis "had a passion for hearing things read aloud, a power of memory for things received in that way, and also a felicity in extempore criticism, none of which were shared (especially not the last) in anything like the same degree by his friends."
But Lewis was also active in several other clubs and maintained a bruising (and occasionally boozy) weekly schedule. He was a member of an Old Icelandic reading group for a time, and the Cave, "a group of English dons who gathered to discuss literary topics and School politics." He went to a biweekly philosophical supper, ran an Elizabethan drama reading group every Tuesday night for students, hosted first-year undergraduates every Wednesday for "Beer and Beowulf," and attended the biweekly Michaelmas Club, an undergraduate club that read papers on philosophy and literature.
When he lived on campus, he ate dinner most nights at the college and would gather with other faculty in the Senior Common Room for coffee, dessert, port—and more conversation. When he took a position at Cambridge in 1954 (while still keeping his home in Oxford) because of the reduced teaching load and significant increase in salary, he complained that the college only allowed one glass of port after dinner for faculty rather than the customary three at Oxford.
When he bought the "The Kilns," a house in the Oxford suburb of Headington in 1930 with his brother, Warren, and Jane King Moore, the mother of his late friend Paddy Moore, Lewis continued his active life on campus, convincing the college to give him rooms on campus to meet students and host events. He would walk or take the bus to campus every morning in time for an 8 a.m. chapel service (on Sundays he would go to Holy Trinity in Headington) and liked to take a stroll around Addison’s Walk in between tutorials and lectures. On a walk home one evening, he was joined by a fellow faculty member who was surprised to discover, Horobin writes, "that the journey involved stopping for a tipple at every pub that they passed." Other evenings, Lewis might remain on campus until early in the morning.
Horobin provides a fair account of Lewis’s unusual and, at times, difficult living arrangement with Mrs. Moore, whom Lewis supported (along with her daughter) after the war. Lewis likely had a sexual relationship with Moore until he converted to Christianity in 1931, but he continued to care for her until her death in 1951. She clashed regularly with Lewis’s brother.
In addition to housing and caring for schoolgirls from London during the war between 1939 and 1945—over those six years 11 teenage girls stayed at the Kilns at various points, with Lewis playing a major role in their care and development—Lewis also kept various pets. In one letter, Horobin writes, "Lewis mentions having four geese, ten hens, a cat and a dog; in another, he refers to a hamster, a rat, rabbits and a wood full of owls at the bottom of the garden."
It is astonishing that Lewis wrote as much as he did given his busy schedule on campus and hectic life at home. Yet, the constant activity proved an "ideal environment" for him, Horobin writes. The "stimulation provided by his tutorial teaching and weekly meetings of the Socratic Club, as well as the feedback and encouragement he derived from regular gatherings with his friends and fellow writers" was "crucial for Lewis as a thinker and writer." "Friendship was key to Lewis’s life," Horobin continues, and "his ideal evening was staying up late in a friend’s college room, ‘talking nonsense, poetry, theology, metaphysics over beer, tea, and pipes.’"
Horobin’s account of Lewis’s Oxford is breezy and entertaining—a perfect book for C.S. Lewis aficionados to read before visiting Oxford itself. It is also entirely convincing that without Oxford, and the friendships it provided, there would have been no C.S. Lewis.
C.S. Lewis’s Oxford
by Simon Horobin
Bodleian Library, 232 pp., $45
Micah Mattix, a professor of English at Regent University, has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.