Inside The Mind That Created Narnia | The Real Life Of C.S Lewis | Absolute History

an enormous crowd gathers in Westminster Abbey to mark the addition of a new name to those of the dramatists and scribes Remembered in Peretz among our great national poets Chaucer Spencer Shakespeare they are commemorating a man who was very well known for his brews not so well known for writing vers CS Lewis wasn't a great poet but his prose guarantees him immortality people think of CS Lewis is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia the Narnia tales were only the smallest fraction of a vast literary output Lewis was an atheist who became a zealous Christian who dedicated himself to explaining a rational basis for the faith his theological books and broadcasts made him one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern age but theology wasn't his real job Lewis was in fact a scholar of medieval literature and a great teacher twenty years ago I wrote a biography of Clive staples Lewis and I suppose what fascinated me about him was he was a man of contrasts he lived through the first part of the 20th century but he hated the modern age he was a popular theologian but he had a great crisis of faith he was an extremely clever person but a total incompetent he failed the driving test 17 times he ended his days as a university professor but he was always a man who at key moments was ruled not by his head but by his heart you [Music] Lewis wrote over 60 books and essays for adults but his best remembered for the seven stories he wrote for children it said that CS Lewis's Narnia stories have sold over a hundred million copies and for those many fans he is a hero the chief characters and the stories are children and the formative influence his own childhood but was that a happy childhood absolutely not CS Lewis was born in 1898 his parents were surprisingly liberal for their time he grew up surrounded by books on all subjects with no limit to what he could read Lewis would make his life and his fame in the most English of surroundings but he was in fact an Ulster man from Belfast this is the little Li the house which Albert Lewis a prosperous Belfast solicitor had built for his family and it's the scene of all CS Lewis's earliest childhood imaginative experiences at the end of an upstairs corridor in what they told the little end room Clive known as Jack and his brother Warren known as money created a fantasy world in his autobiography surprised by joy Jack Lewis recalls a mustn't wait diorama forest the brawny made for him on a biscuit tin lid the first sight of it awakened an obsession with the natural world but a hyper-real version of it magical surreal mythic something more pungent for the real thing he trolled it paradise the first beauty he ever knew this was the beginning of Lewis's sense of longing and elation felt and immediately lost by frayed rooms he described it as an unsatisfied desire that is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction in German they call it Zayn thought it was a rapture he experienced when reading the poet Longfellow on seeing a flowering bush in the garden and missed significantly when reading of the bushy-tailed superhero squirrel Nutkin [Music] like most children of his generation Lewis had read stories about talking animals the mad March Hare in Lewis Carroll or the clothed creatures in Beatrix Potter so it's hardly surprising when he started to invent his own stories of a child his invented world boxing was a place full of talking animals Jack and Warnie were happy in their imaginative worlds but their joy was short-lived in 1908 when Jack was only nine their mother flora died from cancer poor little Jack tormented by toothache crawled out for his mother in the dark and she didn't come and he couldn't understand why she didn't camp and he told a Jane and his father came to him in tears and broke the news it was always devastating to Lewis that he'd never had the chance to say goodbye to his mother before the death there was the happy golden childhood in Northern Ireland after it there was the dark he later wrote it was all sea and islands now the great continent had sunk like Atlantis [Music] the most recent biographer CS Lewis is Alister McGrath he vividly captures the child who had become the great man the death of flora Lewis really brought that a Dilek period to an end it meant that Lewis had lost the Loadstar of his life I think it's very clear that Lewis saw his mother as a figure of stability his father's decision to send Lewis away to boarding school in England immediately after his mother's death I mean may have been well intentioned but it was a mistake and I think led to alienation between Lewis and his father but also I think led Lewis to really feel lonely isolated and wandering one earth things were all about how could he reconnect with a lost family life being sent to school in England so soon after Flora's death was something the nine-year-old Lewis felt acutely he never forgot the horrible experience of sitting on the boat going over to England for the first time and hearing the English voices they made him feel an alien and although he spent all his grown-up life in England he never quite lost that sense that sense of alienation which went as his strong imagination developed with this romantic feeling of yearning and longing for something that was forever lost [Music] luis hated his english rules he later described his experiences as worse than life in the trenches in his utter misery he retreated into a world of fantasy and it was at his english boarding school in 1911 that he made two key discoveries in his emotional and aesthetic journey the sight of the mythic creatures in arthur retinas illustration for vartanus Ring cycle stirred romantic urges in Lewis and when hearing Vadnais music of zigfried and the twilight of the gods itself he was transported to what he describes as pure northern 'less a vision of huge clear spaces hanging about the Atlantic in the endless Twilight Lewis was a sensitive youth appalled by the brutality of public school he loathed athleticism he couldn't catch the ball or wield a baton he used to say his whole life would have been different if he'd had different thumbs he had this weird Samson inherited from his father that there was no joint in his jump you will the pen all right and always use the dip pen luckily for him in his education was about to pass into the hands of a man who cared not one jot about sporting prowess William Kirkpatrick was a patrician classicist from Northern Ireland who taught Lewis his father on realizing Greg's unhappiness at boarding school Albert Lewis decided to send his son to trap Patrick and it was kept Patrick who finished perhaps started Jack Lewis's education at his home in the leafy sorry village of great book M Kirkpatrick was waiting to meet the Train and the shy Lewis happened to remark that he was surprised to find the countryside of Surrey is so wild stop said cap Patrick what do you mean by wild and why should you have a presupposition about the nature of a countryside you've never seen in your life over three years kirkpatrick reengineered lewis intellectual making him a hardness dialectician logician and auditing by eighteen years old lewis read the classics in the original languages and could retain them all and there was another transformation the ouster protestant boy had turned into an Ulster Protestant atheist like Patrick himself at 17 years old Lewis no longer believed in heaven but he was about to step into an earthly hell and although Lewis won a place at Oxford to read classics in 1917 he almost immediately volunteered for active service and was sent here to keyboard college which have been requisitioned for office of training but your debts were arranged alphabetically in the dormitory and then the next-door bed was paid him more the young Irish boy very charming with whom Lewis formed a friendship with their imminent departure to the front line Jack and Paddy made a pact if one of them didn't come back they'd care for the parents of the other Jack's father Albert Lewis or Paddy's mother Janey more paddy was sent to France in October 1917 and Jack arrived a month later of his maintained in writing about CS Lewis I was interested in the psychological turning points that made him and perplexed that the First World War didn't seem to have been one of them he experienced the horror of trench warfare took prisoner a hope German platoon and was wounded by shrapnel that killed comrades fellow combatants that Sassoon Braves and River broad rule were inspired to write great curtsy Lewis also wrote first in the tenth season but the collection spirits in bondage was unremarkable [Music] he seems not to have been much more of a horrible he described the experiences unimportant was he in denial in surprised by joy Lewis uses a very interesting phrase a treaty with reality what he means by that is in effect there is a far wall he's constructed which keeps unsettling thoughts firmly on its other side my own feeling is that the reason he does this is he found it so traumatic that he even finds remembering it very very difficult not creatively but immensely through his friendship with Paddy more he met the woman with whom he'd spend most of his life on the 24th of March 1918 paddy was indeed killed in action and Jack kept his part of the bargain to look after had his mother with peace Kaman returned to University College Oxford he had rooms in college but he was living in the suburbs with mrs. Moore he was 20 she was 46 today the CS Lewis industry includes tourism guide Peter Kathy is familiar with the succession of cheap lodging houses around Oxford where Lewis and mrs. Moore or Minto as he called her lived between 1919 and 1930 we're going to view the first accommodation where mrs. Moore and Louis had had room okay Philip it's quite a modest house yes it would be a two or three-bedroom it was much more modest than the house that Lewis was brought up in oh yes they still had old Gaslight and it definitely wouldn't have had any year central agent it's very touching to think of them there isn't it Peter it is actually yes all the letters that Louis wrote to his father Albert I've always got a college address he's trying to hide this relationship with mrs. Moore Lewis kept secret his relationship was Minto not just because he was adept at compartmentalizing emotional matters there were practical reasons for the subterfuge as an undergraduate at Oxford he was meant to be living in his college it's hard for us to imagine just how strict Oxford was in those days I had an old friend who was a few years younger than Lewis who was sacked in the 1920s from the University the spending one night with a woman in ready Lewis was living with mrs. Moore but he had to keep the relationship secret too from his father that his father was financing not just one student but a family of three not only was the 20 year old Lewis carrying two Minto but also for her daughter Maureen he pulled Minto mother and became a de facto step from a little there was clearly some sort of relationship between Lewis and mrs. Moore which mingled maternal affection and romantic love and why I don't think we really understand that relationship completely mrs. Moore in effect brought Lewis the stability the affection the family context that Lewis felt he was missing partly through the death of his mother but also through the increasing alienation that was building up between himself and his father and living with a woman was a very dangerous thing Oh yet what Lewis did in effect was present mrs. Moore as his landlady the reason why I'm spending time in her house is it I'm renting a room from her and then as things got more complex he presented mrs. Moore as his mother Kirkpatrick's training paid off and by 1923 lewis had a first in classics to his name with another first in English literature for good measure he was increasingly steeping himself in his childhood love of Norse mythology and everything medieval and it was with a fellow medievalist j.r.r tolkien that Lewis formed the fellowship called the Inklings they were a handful of chaps who shared an interest in academic debate erudition and alcohol the eagle and child pub always known as the bird and baby was their oxford drinking den Lewis and cronies used to assemble here on Tuesdays between 12:00 and 1:00 the general idea was to down as much beer as possible before they had lunch in their colleges Lewis had no small talk one of the friends once the Rope as his broken arm in a sling Lewis didn't say oh poor you you've broken your arm it was straight into what does anybody hear us into the Venerable Bede I've been rereading him awfully good stuff Dyson the loudest member of the group once said to me anyone hearing us roar would assume we were talking bored ray in fact we were discussing literature and theology luis not only read the great poets peter was dreamed of becoming one he tried his hand at war poetry unsuccessfully and in 1926 he traded Jane with what he hoped would be his great work dyma is a long rambling narrative poem about the citizen of a totalitarian state who wanders into a forest and there he meets a beautiful woman only it turns out she isn't a woman she's really a monster dyma and the woman monster have Congress and she gives birth to a son and when he grows up he fights dimer and kills him how do I know not unfortunately because I've ever got to the end when I read my own book about Lois I found his prose whatever subject he addressed electrifyingly readable but his poetry oh dear oh dear oh dear and i'ma I'm afraid defeated me poor old Lois it took him ten years to write and when it was published it was such a flop and ever afterwards he felt so resentful of the success and fame of his contemporary poets Lewis was however a great success as a medieval scholar his academic passion had paid off and in 1925 he had been appointed a fellow of maudlin college teaching English literature the position came of the salary of five hundred pounds a year rooms and dining CS Lewis spent hours of his life in this wonderful place to camp his library reading and reading and reading primary texts the great texts of English literature Spencer Shakespeare Milton that was stuff that interested him we tend to take it for granted as English literature is one of the main subjects studied in universities but this was not the case when Lewis first lost his job at Oxford indeed there were many of the all-male colleges that didn't teach English at all he thought of it as a girls subject now Sol Keenan Lewis were very much of the opinion that English literature should have a sound scholarly and above all historical base [Music] lore - fellow of Worcester College Oxford is a medievalist with an appreciation of the Irishman's contribution to the field I think people forget how young English literature is as a subject I mean Lewes of course just picked it up in a year after he'd done the real subject of classics and this was a time when people were staking out the ground what's the point is this a technical subject or is it a subject that's about grand ideas of culture and the human and I think that's very clearly Louis's approach it's exhilarating reading his work when you read something like the allegory of love written in 1936 what he does is draw us into seeing the world in a new way he says my own eyes are not enough for me I will see through the eyes of others and reality is not enough for me I will see what other men have invented so what was it like having CS Lewis as your tutor what was it like being taught by him in his rooms just above me here in new buildings more than college his nickname was heavy Lewis and he could be a bit heavy one of his pupils once said he couldn't see the point of Matthew Arnold Sarabande Rustom great epic poem Lewis was so appalled as he reached for his old regimental sword which was lying in the corner of the room and said the sword must settle this but it wasn't all confrontation when he first encountered his tutor actor to be Robert hard it was in uniform as he was when we met Robert I noticed you're wearing a maudlin college tie yes I did I put it on for the occasion that was presumably where you met CS Lewis yes absolutely I vividly remember going through the porters Lodge and there on the lawn coming towards me I saw a man I thought oh it's a gardener but he had a tie on so I thought oh he's the head gardener and then immediately behind me as he passed he said are you Hardy and I admitted and he said oh well there now it's 11 o'clock and I'm going to be fine minutes late I'm Louis by the way and I couldn't believe it I was absolutely staggered at his appearance from reading all the stuff that my tutor at school told me to read I got a picture of Louis it was a sort of El Greco Jesuit thin insistent you know and rather frightening probably pale and inhales failing intense absolutely but my goodness me there was this jolly farmer and I was absolutely in my element because I'm a country bumpkin so I've adored him ever after did he entertain his pupils oh yes he did he gave a wonderfully jolly and extraordinary parties with lots of booze I remember being hopelessly behind with an essay and I said oh mr. Lewis I wonder would it be possible and I'm supposed to be reading my essay to tomorrow it finished it I wonder if I could come on Thursday and he said no no no don't bother about it for a second come next Wednesday at the usual time with an extra specially good essay because the great thing about being at university is to enjoy yourself which I hope you are and besides look at you in uniform you'll be off soon and you may well get killed it's proper that you enjoy yourself which was so wonderful Lewis was only a little older than his pupils but of those he took two he seems to have been fatherly his relations with his own father however were more difficult in 1929 Albert Lewis was taken ill his son was as an emotional Crossrail Lewis came home to Belfast to see his father he and Albert had barely been in contact for a decade even though his father had supported him through his career Lewis regarded his treatment of his father as the greatest sin of his life but they were reconciled when he realized that Albert Lewis was dying jack came back to East Belfast and they had six golden weeks together in which the two men forged a friendship sadly the oxford term was about to begin and Lewis left four days later after waving goodbye to his son Albert Lewis died Lewis returned here for his father's funeral and left this window behind me as a memorial to his parents his father was for Lewis a symbol of a lost childhood it wasn't so much his father he liked it was much more what his father represented I think one of the most moving parts of Lewis's correspondence is a description of how after his father's death he and his brother bury all their childhood toys in the ground of little Lee almost saying let's get closure on this this is the end of childhood the Lewis boys drew a line and moved on or did they Jack Lewis had replaced his dead mother with a mother substitute in Minto Albert's passing coincided with what might be seen as a process of finding a replacement father figure Lewis had gone to the Western Front a devout atheist and returned with his convictions Harbor it was to be a slow process but at certain he began to change in the Trinity town of 1929 I gave him and admitted that rod was drawed and knelt and prayed perhaps that night the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England Lewis started to attend his college Chapel here this is his stall as a fellow of the college but of course at this stage he still simply believed in God he hadn't advanced to the position of believing in Jesus Christ he had not yet completed his journey Lewis had been a modern man someone who believed in the money philosophy that the world is all there is that we live in a world of the matter in matter alone yet he hated being modern he felt as though he'd been in prison and this is how he describes it in his autobiography the odd thing was that before God closed in on me I was in fact offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice I became aware I was holding something at bay or shutting something out or if you like I was wearing some stiff clothing like corsets or even a suit of armor as if I were a lobster he felt he was being given the choice I doesn't keep this suit of armor on also discarded he made the choice to discard the carapace of modern materials this rather weird experience this liberation of Louis's imagination occurred all of us very home from modeling after a day's work so headington and mrs. Laura Lewis the great medievalist love it pathology could see the attraction of Christianity but he could not yet believe it until one very significant conversation with his close friend j.r.r tolkien on the night of the 19th of September 1931 they were here with another friend Hugo Dyson on Edison's walk and as they walked Dyson and Tolkien talked to Luis about religion they talked about myth how did it be Luis said that there are so many myths in the old world in Egypt in Greece in the Nordic mythologies of a young man God dying and coming back to life of baltra in the Nordic mythology of adonus in Greece how do you distinguish him that and Jesus Christ in the Gospels who surely is a mythological figure who dies in order to rise and save us from our sins isn't that just a myth - yes sir token of course Christianity is a myth it just happens to be the one myth which is true talking in particular was able to show Lewis that Christianity was a story a sense-making story that grasped the imagination but this one was right and if this one was right it positioned all other myths and Lewis suddenly realized this was the missing link this enabled him to see how Christianity and literature connected up with each other [Music] Lewis's central problem how could the Christian myth be the only true was dealt with all religions glimpse the wonder of God but Christianity is the big picture the moment of enlightenment happened not on the road to Damascus but on the b48 nine to Dunstable they were having a family outing to whipsnade zoo Maureen Minto Warner and Jack Lewis tells us that when they set out on that journey he didn't believe that Jesus was the son of God by the time they'd arrived at whipsnade he did [Music] still committed to life at home looking after Minto and Laurie Lewis was now a full convert to Christianity he saw it his duty to explain his new faith and began to write as a Christian apologist the Screwtape Letters about human temptation described how one senior devil instructs a junior devil and the problem of pain written in 1940 tries to explain our loving God can allow us to suffer [Music] in summer 1940 France fell and in September the aerial bombardment of Britain's population began Louis's writings chimed with hard times and his apologetics for inspirational far side reading but radio was the medium of the age and the best means of broadcasting Lewis's words of comfort at the beginning of the Second World War the BBC asked Lewis to give broadcast talks a defense of the Christian religion they had an immense effect many people regarded Lewis as the greatest broadcaster of the war many placed him above Churchill himself in 1952 Lewis published a version of his wartime talks the book has never been out of print mere christianity is one of his most popular books one of the great strengths of Lewis's wartime talks is the way in which is able to use language which really resonates with his audience he tells stories he uses analogies he speaks in a very accessible way one person once described it as a port wine and plum pudding voice but there's an intellectual content to what Lewis is saying as well it's not here are very good reasons for believing in God it's much more look if there were a God doesn't make a lot of sense of what we experience within us and observe around us the wartime broadcasts made him a star at home and the publication in 1942 of the Screwtape Letters made him an American celebrity by an irony his abilities of popularized theological ideas made him haiti's in the one place that really mattered to him oxygen seen from the outside at 44 Lewis was in his prime but the Oxford academics weren't so impressed what was an English Don doing writing popular theology Lewis was a spellbinding lecturer so popular they found it difficult to get lecture halls large enough to accommodate his audiences he was by far the most distinguished member of the Oxford English faculty and yet when it came to guessing professorships and promotion he was always passed over why because the mean-spirited ox the dongs resented his popularity also in post-war Oxford Christianity was hated and Lewis was really a martyr for his faith much to Oxford's shame and when it came to finding relief there wasn't so much at home either since 1930 Lewis and his brother had shared this house the kills with Minter and Maureen Moore today the place is a shrine presided over by acolytes like Deborah Higgins welcome to the counts come into the common room wonder this is where Lewis would have received you it's also where Lewis did some writing there was a desk under the window just like this one yes he did have bookcases on either side of the fireplace no he owned over 3000 books himself and then we also have the the map here of Narnia a lovely thing to have yes it is it's beautiful this typewriter is our only original artifact from the two brothers and it's major Warren Lewis's typewriter it was on this very machine as he typed yes he said in his diary he typed over 12,000 of Louis's fan mail letters let's take a look upstairs doesn't it there's three bedrooms that was Maureen's room this one which was mrs. Moore's room and then this one which was CS Lewis's bedroom so a very frugal room they probably only had about two fires that were ever lit in the house yes yes well in CS Lewis's letters he writes someone tells them that he reached out to get a cup of water and the water was frozen [Music] transitions were wintry all right by the end of the war Minto was 73 and her health was deteriorating Warnie now an alcoholic increasingly depended on Jack [Music] Lewis's faith might have been holding him together at home but his confidence was seriously shaken one February evening in 1948 the socratic Society was a Christian debating Club CS Lewis often came to debate the philosophical implications of Christianity or how these religious ideas impacted on society at large he must have looked forward to one of his debating evenings in which the cut and thrust of the famous Lewis was on display and his opponents were all over the floor how wrong he was sir Antony Kenny was a priest before he became a philosopher he knew Louis's debating opponent wealth an immensely gifted scholar named Elizabeth Anscombe as a philosopher she would become legendary as would her encounter with Lewis Lewis had published a book called miracles in which he maintained that give everything that we say and think is the result of purely mechanical processes in our brain then there can't be any value there can't be any truth nothing can be either true or false and Askim refuted this with simple argument she said suppose I stand on one of those weighing machines that say I speak your weight and it says to me you weigh 15 stone that is true even though it is produced by totally mechanical means and this simple argument did really undercut Lewis's position it's a paradox isn't it because a lot of people sources a conflict between the Christian Lewis and this bright Sparty are one moved in fact she was fervently Christian as well she was a very devout Roman Catholic that was what particularly wounded yes he felt they should have been allies fighting side-by-side in the battle against naturalism and secularism and here he was brought down by friendly fire [Music] after the ants from debate Lewis felt humiliated I remember Dyson telling me as he come back to the pub Lewis and he put his head in his hands and said I've been utterly crushed I've been humiliated and he wrote afterwards that he'd been obliterated as an apologist and it's very striking that after that moment Lewis wrote no more Christian apologetics aimed at converting unbelievers he'd already written a highly successful space trilogy and he'd been dabbling with the idea of children's stories but it's surely no accident that after his humiliation in a philosophical debate in Oxford he turned to the world beyond the Wardrobe [Music] the four children in the land the Witch and the Wardrobe do to stay in the house of a professor Kirke who bears more than a passing resemblance to track Patrick Lewis's old tutor they find at the toppers house a magic wardrobe when they pass through it they've entered the land of Narnia when the professor discovers that they've had this experience he's amazed that they haven't related it to reading the philosopher Plato Plato who believed that this world was but the shadow of a real world beyond in another way you could say the Narnia stories were an enactment of that great conversation he had with talking about a myth which happened to be true this magical world of Narnia was a work of Lewis's imagination but it's easy to see the influences of the landscape that Jack and Warnie grew up in of northerners thin light and remnants of a land beyond almost the first physical contact that Lewis had with the Middle Ages must have been in the ruined castles of Northern Ireland where he had holidays with his mother just up the bay from here dunluce castle which many people think is the model for Cara Paravel the castle in Narnia at the end of the Narnia stories in the last battle CAIR Paravel is besieged and it seems as though everything is lost and the children believe that the forces of God have been defeated but they learn that everything they've loved in this life has actually been preserved for them a very potent image by Lewis a feeling that all his longings and all the things he's loved and lost in this life will in fact be kept and preserved as with the Buried childhood toys in the garden of Little League Lewis clung on to the hope that the love he had for his lost mother would in some way be saved unspoiled by separation the Narnia chronicles comes straight from the heart and it is in these adventures we see most clearly the combination of Lewis the Christian and Lewis the medievalist I think what he was doing with the whole world of Narnia was developing a world which makes symbolism true whether or not you think how a real world is symbolic of a higher reality it's very clear that Lewis's invented Narnian world is symbolic of some higher reality that he was reaching toward I mean when you have for example Aslan the lion giving up his life as he lies on the slab is a symbol of Christ's atoning sacrifice right exactly what we suddenly get is an access of really sharp medieval theology because we have Aslan explain when he's resurrected explained to the children that what he's done is play a trick on the Evil Queen whereby she has been tricked into sacrificing an innocent who had no guilt in the place of someone else he was guilty and therefore he the magic is broken death is overturned now that is absolutely the theory of Christ's crucifixion in the Middle Ages and there it is set out in the middle of this children's book Lewis had no children of his own it started his relationship with mrs. Moore when he was 19 and she was 45 so even if they've married that hardly I've had children but she had children and she was a very motherly type and indeed adopted in an informal way quite a lot of children over the years and when war came this house the kilns filled up with evacuate children amongst them a Londoner named june fluid who in 1942 joined them as an evacuee she would grow up to become actress Jill Raymond then wife of MP Clement Freud she adored Louis's books but at first Jill had no idea who that we do nur of the Kilmer's was I've been there two or three days when he arrived and I was in the kitchen and mrs. Moore said oh here's Jack I was able to chat to him quite happily as a 16 year old girl until a few days later when I looked at the bookshelves and saw all these books by CS Lewis he was my hero but I had no idea that it was Jack certainly fan I should think nearly a week I was unable to look at him to speak to him I felt so shy I just thought he was wonderful at which he was Jack was an extremely kind man to know personally he was the kindest person I mean when I left he paid my fees at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art for two years I could never have had that training without him he changed my life because he allowed me to become a professional actress Jill is possibly the only person surviving who knew Minto and who witnessed the relationship between her and Jack it was the most loving gentle kind relationship between the two of them more visibly from his side because she was she was a feisty lady and I didn't showed her emotions very easily when I got there I found that she had open varicose ulcers on her legs but Jack was so gentle with her and so kind and so loving and always looking after her and and trying to do the best for that he could Lewis was a mammoth a strong desire to change lives for the better but there was one person he couldn't much help Minto his first love had been there for Jack for 33 years but she was suffering from dementia and he was fretted by two worries the illness itself and having to find 500 pounds a year to pay for her care and then in January 1951 the worry was taken from him dear old mento died the death of the second woman he had so loved must have reminded him of the first of his mother whom he lost at the tender age of nine a time when he felt so terribly alone in 1954 the University of Cambridge offered its first share of Medieval and Renaissance English literature to Lewis it was a post tailor made and designed with him in mind his allegory of love was the standard text on pro kleh love and he just completed his impressive volume on 16th century literature it's astonishing then that when Cambridge offered him the job he declined it twice his reasons were entirely emotional Lewis believed when Cambridge offered him this job that he'd have to come for the whole term eight weeks and more so be away from Oxford for the best part of two or three months and this was something he felt he just couldn't do partly he loved the pubs and his friends and I said but the real reason was Warren II he was the only person who to really care for Warren e when Warren it was in the grip of alcoholism obviously Jack wouldn't explain that Cambridge but professor Tolkien was the hero of the hour he told Cambridge that Lewis was frightened of leaving officer to such a long time and they said of course you can commute after he learnt that Lewis accepted the job [Music] luis immediately liked cambridge and unlike oxford cambridge liked him lewis decided the Fenland town was smaller softer and more old-fashioned Jack gave his first lecture on his 56th birthday 29th of November 1954 the move to a new University made the headlines the BBC even considered doing a live broadcast of a lecture which promised to be an absolute corker Lewis presented to an appreciative audience not an argument but a man himself the old world from classical times to the 19th century was all essentially the same then came machines and atheist Lewis wasn't part of the mob unbelieving technologically advancing world he was prehistoric and glad of it he ended his lecture by telling his Cambridge audience that what they'd hired was an example of old Western man he was selling himself as a kind of intellectual dinosaur it was rather an absurd claim since he belonged to the same generation as the people to whom he was speaking was I suppose he meant was he was a modern man who simply hated being modern despite Lewis's insistence that he firmly belongs in the past it looked as though he would last forever he had 13 more books in him and more than 40 articles and papers the four loves in 1960 was the mature reflections of a man who had looked back on a lifetime of relationships with the wartime publication in the United States of the Screwtape Letters Lewis had become internationally famous with that fame came a vast correspondence particularly American Lewis made a point of replying to everyone he had hundreds of pen friends and one August day in 1952 found him in this hotel the Eastgate awaiting a meeting with one of those pen friends he never met her she was an American woman and it had read to meet here for a cup of tea and a chat joy David Mann was a former communist an aspiring writer married but very unhappily with two sons she was sixteen years younger than Jack Lewis and fell in love with him or was the idea of him Douglas Gresham was the younger of Joy's two sons he and his brother David would eventually become Jack's stepsons he had never before met a mind quite so active and quite so so broadly educated as oh really absolutely she was actually more widely read than he was Jack had read everything in Europe but my mother had read everything in Europe and everything in America as well doctor do you think at that stage they were friends really wrong very good friends indeed and of course she'd been communicating with Jack by mail for some years so he has is indeed of course she was divorce yes the Foreign Office had said that they were not going to renew her visitor's visa Jack very charitably said we'll look the answer to this is you're so insistent you really really want to stay in England I'd rather rather you did why don't we have a civil marriage ceremony was his idea it wasn't a marriage of love at that no it wasn't I think that didn't happen to acquire quite some time later luis crawled his autobiography surprised by joy and now he really was surprised by a person called joy and so were his friends bachelor luis had now become the stepfather of two little boys and the fussy old kilns was being knocked into shape by an energetic american woman but it wasn't to be long before everything turned to catastrophe the telephone rang and she'd been in she didn't pin payment was diagnosed with sciatica and things like that for sometime quite a lot mouth pain and she went to answer the telephone tripped and snapped her thigh bone she was taken off to hospital and found to be suffering from what they thought was going to be very shortly terminal cancer I was taken to the hospital having come back from school and to be told that my mother was dying and I was 10 years old and I knew no other human being in the world really to relate to or my mother she was expected to die within days or weeks and not literally longer than that Jack had been here before both women plays this to him he had loved and lost and memories must have rushed back but with them something new the eken ISM a woman he'd married as a favor seemed to have inspired something deeper he wrote his friend Dorothy L Sayers we soon learn to love what we know we must lose joy might not have long and he needed to act fast he asked a pupil of his now a priest named Peter bide for a bedside marriage this time with a Christian ceremony Peter bye said what else could I do the woman was dying Lois clearly loved her Peter Biden had a history of healing I think Lois felt that that actually happened because joy went into remission shortly afterwards and Lewis and joy and it seemed to have enjoyed at least some time of relative happiness before unfortunately the cancer came back in July 1960 joy Lewis died at home with her husband at her bedside he was plunged into despair left doubting the many drawers he'd spent so many years explaining championing defending believing he had held on to his faith when Minto died now Lewis felt abandoned his crisis of faith would be the last great turmoil of his life no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear there the opening words of a grief observed and the manuscript is preserved here in the Bob Dylan library it's an intensely moving thing looking at this manuscript it's written almost without correction only 34 pages every one of which is so raw so grief-stricken so full of pain so honest I think that's why it made such an enormous impact on so many different readers with your contemplating your own death or whether you're in the hideous agony of grieving for somebody you love this isn't what which speaks to you [Music] do you think he lost his faith after she died I don't think Lewis lost his faith I think it went through a period of recalibration I think that Lewis began to realize that simplistic rationalizations of faith actually had their limits and there were certain things that couldn't quite be put in those simple categories he'd used earlier in his career many would say that a grief observed is a much more mature and wise and raw book than the simple rationalist argument of a problem of pain [Music] Jack joins joy and Minto just three years later dying from the prostate cancer only seven days short of his 65th birthday on the 22nd of November 1963 [Music] on that bleak raw November day almost nobody came to the burial Warne had taken to his bed too drunk to tell anybody the time of the funeral and in the world at large in the newspaper on the wireless Jack's death was overshadowed by the news of President Kennedy's assassination on the very same day and the passing of Aldous Huxley so his death like so much in CS Lewis's life was almost a secret [Music] in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit [Music] luis set himself up as an intellectual at war with his own times but he wasn't really an intellect well he was always a man guided by his heart rather than by his head in fact he had the temperament of a poet even though he couldn't write poetry but although he was a man who lived his life in an exclusively male world of colleges that life was punctuated by the loss of the three women he loved [Music] [Music]

Channel: Absolute History

Views: 499,455

Rating: 4.8480787 out of 5

Keywords: history history documentary funny history fun history school, timeline, c.s. lewis, cs lewis, jrr tolkien, c. s. lewis (author), the chronicles of narnia (literary series), absolute history, full length documentaries, documentary history, history documentary, the lion witch and the wardrobe, the lion witch and the wardrobe full movie, the lion witch and the wardrobe audiobook

Id: qgj3ctK7o30

Length: 57min 36sec (3456 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 25 2019