The Eros of C.S. Lewis
The sexual life of C.S. Lewis in three movements, from Philomastix to Mrs. Moore to Joy
There was a time in the late 1990s and early 2000s when the Christian Booksellers Association retail show was a highlight of my summer each year. Now, online retailing and market shifts have diminished the retail show to a shadow of what it once was—but it was an exciting annual adventure while it lasted. During those years, publishers provided authors with opportunities to give away copies of their books in book-signing events that placed them alongside other authors. I met all sorts of better known and more talented writers at those events, from J.I. Packer to Donald Miller and many more.
And that’s where, in 2005, I met C.S. Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham.
The retail show was in Denver that year. I was there with Rose Publishing, signing an early version of my book Christian History Made Easy. Douglas Gresham was signing boxed compact discs from the Focus on the Family adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia. Douglas is, of course, the son of Joy Davidman Gresham, the woman C.S. Lewis famously married in a civil union in 1956 and in an ecclesiastical ceremony in 1957.
When I first saw him in 2005, Douglas Gresham was surrounded by stacks of radio-drama compact discs and posters for the feature film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, scheduled to be released later in 2005. Perhaps not surprisingly, the line to speak to him was considerably longer than the line to receive a free copy of Christian History Made Easy.
To be more precise, a steady swell of eager people streamed into his line to speak to C.S. Lewis’s stepson, while my line… well, there actually wasn’t ever a line to obtain free copies of my introduction to the history of Christianity. There was a sporadic trickle of people in search of freebies that didn’t require waiting in line. Because of that, I had plenty of time to listen while Douglas Gresham signed books and compact-disc boxes, shook hands, and answered questions.
It was during those moments that I considered the sex life of C.S. Lewis for the first time in my life—which was something I had actually never thought about before.
In all fairness, it wasn’t my fault that these thoughts crossed my mind.
The thoughts were due to a question that a woman directed to Douglas Gresham as he signed her compact-disc box. I can’t recall exactly how the woman worded the question, but I do recall wincing at the inappropriateness of it.
Her question had to do with whether Joy and C.S. Lewis ever consummated their marriage.
Who on earth considers it appropriate to ask someone about his mother’s sexual relationship with his stepfather?
But apparently this woman thought it was an acceptable question.
Awkward.
Douglas is a person of exceptional grace, and he sidestepped any direct answer to the question with more poise than I could have mustered in such a moment. His line kept moving, and my respect for him multiplied. After the book-signing was over, Douglas stayed to meet my wife and oldest daughter. Then, he gave my daughter a poster from the upcoming movie along with a signed copy of the Focus on the Family dramatizations of The Chronicles of Narnia on compact disc.
In the years since that moment, every time I run across anything about sexuality in the writings of C.S. Lewis, I cannot avoid recalling that awkward moment in the book-signing line in Denver. After reading all of Lewis’s letters and journals over the past few years, I have learned far more than I knew at that time about his thoughts on eros, and I have found him to be a helpful—albeit imperfect—guide to this divinely-designed aspect of our humanity.
What I want to do in this article is to explore eros—sexual love and desire—in the life of C.S. Lewis. I don’t want to do this with morbid curiosity regarding what he did and didn’t do but with thoughtful reflections on how his life experiences impacted how he understood eros.
The first observation begins with a disordered desire that emerged when Lewis was a teenager.
1. Philomastix: A Disordered Distortion of Desire
By early 1917, eighteen-year-old C.S. Lewis—known to family and friends as “Jack”—had developed a disordered pattern of desire in which the inflicting of pain on others sexually aroused him. The precise origin of this perversion in his imagination remains unclear. Lewis understood a particular line in William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End as an indication that Morris was a “special devotee of the rod,” but this reference is actually quite vague (letter to Arthur Greeves, January 31, 1917). Lewis fixated on hints of this pattern in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau as well, but only after the twisted fascination was already part of his life (letter to Arthur Greeves, February 20, 1917). He sought out the erotic works of Marquis de Sade, but this too occurred after his distorted desire had already developed (letter to Arthur Greeves, June 10, 1917).
Whatever the origin of his fixation, Lewis signed at least three of his letters to Arthur Greeves in the winter of 1917 as “Philomastix,” “friend of the whip.” During this time period, he also fixated his fantasies about such practices on specific people. After visiting the master of the university, Lewis noted that the man’s “wife and niece were there, both very decent, indeed the latter wouldn’t be a bad subject for the lash” (January 28, 1917). Throughout the spring of 1917, Lewis still desired such experiences (letter to Arthur Greeves, June 3, 1917), but he asked Arthur Greeves to keep their discussions of their respective sexual predilections “on the side that tends to beauty, and avoid everything that tends to sordid-ness and beastly police court sort of scandal out of grim real life” (March 6, 1917).
On the evening of June 9, 1917, C.S. Lewis’s predilection went public, at least among some students at Oxford University. Lewis got “royally drunk” for the first time in his life, following a celebration dinner for two fellow students who received “firsts” in their college examinations. At some point in his inebriated state, Lewis began going “round imploring everyone to let me whip them for the sum of 1s. a lash” (letter to Arthur Greeves, June 10, 1917).1
It was around this time that C.S. Lewis met Edward Francis Courtenay “Paddy” Moore and, no less significantly, Paddy Moore’s mother Janie.
After joining the Officers’ Training Corps to support British efforts in the Great War, Moore and Lewis became roommates in E Company of Officer Cadet Battalion 4, billeted at Keble College in Oxford. The primary reason for this assignation was alphabetical. In this particular battalion, “Lewis” was followed by “Moore.” Thus a fluke of the alphabet changed Lewis’s life.
Paddy “is a very decent sort of man,” Lewis wrote to his father soon after this assignment and then added: “His mother, an Irish lady, is staying up here and I have met her once or twice” (June 18, 1917). In an earlier letter, Lewis referred to Paddy as “childish” but likable nevertheless. Lewis quickly befriended not only Paddy but also his mother.
C.S. Lewis stayed with Mrs. Moore and Paddy in Bristol from September 29 until October 11, and Mrs. Moore cared for him while he recovered from a cold. It is impossible to know precisely what conversations or encounters may have occurred between the two of them during these weeks; however, whatever occurred radically redirected his perspective on sexuality. According to Lewis,
Since coming back & meeting a certain person I have begun to realize that it was not at all the right thing for me to tell you so much as I did. I must therefore try to undo my actions as far as possible by asking you to try & forget my various statements & not to refer to the subject. Of course I have perfect trust in you, mon vieux, but still I have no business to go discussing those sort of things with you. So in future that topic must be taboo between us. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 28, 1917)
Given the context, the “certain person” in this letter was almost certainly Paddy’s mother, Mrs. Janie Moore. To the best of my knowledge, after this letter, Lewis never articulated any sadistic or masochistic sexual inclinations again.
2. An Odd Affair: C.S. Lewis’s Strange Relationship with Mrs. Moore
“I like her immensely,” C.S. Lewis wrote to his father regarding Mrs. Janie Moore, mother of his friend Paddy Moore (August 27, 1917)—and it is immensely clear that he did.
But how did he like Mrs. Moore, both then and later?
The answer to that question is not entirely clear.
This much is clear: By autumn 1917, Jack had promised Paddy that he would care for his mother if Paddy was killed in the war; Paddy made the same vow in return, regarding Jack’s father.
So who was Mrs. Moore? She was born on March 28, 1872, in Northern Ireland as Janie King Askins. Her father was a vicar in the Church of Ireland. She married a civil engineer in 1897, and they had two children, Paddy and Maureen. The marriage was, however, unhappy. By 1907, Mr. and Mrs. Moore had separated, and she moved to Bristol, England to be nearer her brother and sister.
While Paddy was awaiting deployment in 1917, Mrs. Moore and Maureen moved to Oxford to be near him during his training. It was during these months that 45-year-old Janie Moore met 18-year-old C.S. Lewis.
Paddy and Jack went to the Western Front in November 1917. At some point prior to this deployment, C.S. Lewis grew to view Mrs. Moore as an object of affection, but the precise nature of the affection remains unclear. Was it maternal, romantic, or somehow both? While recovering from trench fever in February 1918, he wrote these words to Arthur Greeves:
How I should love one of our old afternoons again when we sat in your drawing room and discussed our tea and digestive biscuits: we were usually discontented over something but we had many a good laugh… Perhaps you don’t believe that I want all that again, because other things more important have come in: but after all there is room for other things besides love in a man’s life. As well, you should trust in me after I have given you so much confidence. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, February 2, 1918)
Mrs. Moore seems to have introduced “other things more important,” accompanied by an infatuation that was perceived as a possible competitor with Arthur’s friendship. His friendship with Arthur could continue precisely because there was room in his life for other things “besides love”—but what sort of “love” is unclear.
On April 15, 1918, an artillery shell exploded near C.S. Lewis and left him with shrapnel in his left leg, left side, and the back of his left hand. Unbeknownst to Lewis, Paddy Moore was killed in another region of France around the same time Lewis was wounded. During his recovery from his injuries, Lewis developed an almost Manichaean perspective on physical desire.
My views at present are getting almost monastic about all the lusts of the flesh. They seem to me to extend the dominion of matter over us: and, out here, where I see spirit continually dodging matter (shells, bullets, animal fears, animal pains) I have formulated my equation Matter = Nature = Satan. And on the other side Beauty, the only spiritual & not-natural thing that I have yet found. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, May 23, 1918)
His only positive comment regarding lust and sexual pleasure was that it is “a kind of sugar-plum that nature gives us to make us breed, as she does the beetles and toads” (letter to Arthur Greeves, May 29, 1918). At the same time, his comments regarding God suggest that he may also have been seeking to justify his pursuit of such lusts: “I believe in no God, least of all one that would punish me for the ‘lusts of the flesh’” (letter to Arthur Greeves, June 3, 1918).
While recovering in London, Lewis and Mrs. Moore saw “a good deal of each other” (letter to Albert Lewis, June 20, 1918), and the young man’s connection with this middle-aged woman deepened. On January 13, 1919, C.S. Lewis returned to University College in Oxford, at the beginning of Hilary term. Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen soon followed. They rented a house at 28 Warneford Road, which was a pleasant half-hour walk from University College when I was there in summer.
At the end of the academic year, Lewis moved into this house with Mrs. Moore and began financially supporting Janie and Maureen. C.S. Lewis would continue to live with Mrs. Moore and support her, in a variety of different locations, for more than three decades, until her failing health required her to be placed in a nursing home in October 1950.
Another arrangement may have begun around this time as well.
According to Lewis’s secretary Walter Hooper, a sexual relationship was initiated between Mrs. Moore and C.S. Lewis. This information came from Owen Barfield, one of Lewis’s closest friends in the late 1920s and very early 1930s.
Owen Barfield told me that… Lewis told him there had been a sexual relationship and it began really at the time, right after he came out of the army. And he, as he himself has said about himself, he was not a moral man at that time. He believed in morality, he believed in goodness, but… they did have an affair. And it lasted until Lewis was converted to Christianity.
Some scholars—most notably, in recent biographies, Harry Lee Poe—have doubted whether such an affair actually took place. Other scholars—particularly A.N. Wilson—have speculated, exaggerated, and over-read the evidence for a sexual relationship. Nevertheless, despite my distaste for the idea of this relationship, I am inclined by the evidence to think that an affair probably did develop between C.S. Lewis and Mrs. Moore.
The validity of the testimony from Walter Hooper depends on three factors: (1) Would C.S. Lewis have told Owen Barfield about this relationship? (2) Would Barfield have spoken truthfully about what Lewis said? And, (3) would Walter Hooper have made up or misremembered this conversation with Owen Barfield? In my view, Lewis might indeed have told Barfield about the affair, and Hooper certainly would not have fabricated it.
Would Owen Barfield have known?
When C.S. Lewis ranked his friends in 1931, the only two individuals in the first rank were Owen Barfield and Arthur Greeves. Although Barfield ceased to be as much a part of his life after 1931, he was certainly a close friend prior to C.S. Lewis’s conversion. Barfield was also the lawyer who assisted with Lewis’s will and finances. It makes sense, then, that Lewis might have entrusted Barfield with this embarrassing fact from his past. Due to Barfield’s involvement with Lewis’s financial dealings, it is also understandable why Lewis might have shared the reasons for his continued support of Mrs. Moore. Thus, while it is uncertain whether he shared this information with Barfield, it is certainly conceivable.
Did Owen Barfield tell the truth?
Owen Barfield did seem to have had mixed feelings at times about his association with C.S. Lewis, and his involvement with the Inklings has been frequently overstated. Still, it is difficult to imagine why he would have told Hooper about something so momentous if it didn’t occur at all. If there is any breakdown in the truthfulness of this account, I do suspect that it occurred in Owen Barfield’s telling of the story to Walter Hooper—but I struggle to see why Barfield would have concocted an affair.
Did Walter Hooper tell the truth?
Walter Hooper was never prone to sensationalism, and he would have had little reason to misrepresent what Barfield had conveyed to him. Hooper did not record his recollection until 2009, but he did so with the express condition that the information would not be released until his death. It is certainly possible that Hooper might have misremembered some details—for example, I suspect the affair ended earlier than Hooper seems to suggest. Yet, no substantial rationale sustains the supposition that Walter Hooper would have completely misremembered or fabricated the affair itself. Simply because biographers such as A.N. Wilson have exaggerated evidence and over-interpreted obscure clues does not falsify Walter Hooper’s fundamental assertion, which exhibits every sign of trustworthiness.
The nature of the relationship
If a sexual relationship between C.S. Lewis and Mrs. Janie Moore did occur, it may have occurred somewhat surreptitiously. To the best of my knowledge, there is no direct evidence that Mrs. Moore’s daughter Maureen was aware of any affair at the time that it occurred, although she did later suggest that some inappropriate relationship may have taken place. “I find the continued raking over of Jack’s domestic history both embarrassing and distasteful,” she wrote on June 6, 1978, without clarifying precisely what she found embarrassing or whether it was true.
Regardless of whether or not an affair did take place, Lewis and Moore apparently did not regularly sleep together. A letter to Arthur Greeves reveals that Jack was sleeping on the sofa at Mrs. Moore’s flat in summer 1919 (August 24, 1919). Some of these factors might suggest a more innocent relationship. And yet, as much as I want to believe in a platonic caregiving relationship between the two of them, there are a number of anomalies that fit better with the testimony of Walter Hooper that a sexual relationship did take place.
Further suggestions of an affair
One particular hint of an inappropriate relationship may be observed in the weeks following the death of Albert Lewis. C.S. Lewis refused to spend the night with Mrs. Moore—to whom he also referred as “Minto”—under the roof of his childhood home after his father’s death. His rationale was that he would have been disregarding his father’s “laws” in his father’s house (“Leeborough”). As a result, he asked Arthur Greeves if they might stay at Bernagh, the Greeves’ family home, with Mrs. Moore posing as a mutual friend of Arthur’s and Jack’s.
I want to have Minto with me and she v. much wants to come… But I cannot (and she agrees) take her to Leeborough. There are ghosts there who wd. not be happy to see her nor anxious to make her happy. Also, it wd. look like the traditional insolence of an heir, trampling on the old king’s laws before the crown is warm on his head. But I could take her to Bernagh as a mutual friend of yours and mine. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, October 28, 1929; see also letter to Warnie Lewis, December 21, 1929)
Why would he be concerned with trampling his father’s “laws” if nothing inappropriate had marked his relationship with Mrs. Moore? Why would he take her to Arthur’s house posing “as a mutual friend” if she was not in fact something more than a recipient of Lewis’s care? Some of these bits of evidence could be interpreted in a multiplicity of ways. Coupled with the testimony of Walter Hooper, however, they support the strong likelihood that a sexual relationship transpired between C.S. Lewis and Mrs. Moore.2
Locking the door to the past
But, then, in the early months of 1930, something started to change in the life of C.S. Lewis.
“Chastity” began to make an appearance in his letters. “I seem to have been supported in respect to chastity and anger more continuously, and with less struggle, for the last ten days or so,” he wrote to Arthur Greeves on January 30, 1930, “than I often remember to have been: and have had the most delicious moments of It.” “It” was his way of indicating to Arthur the experience of Joy. The next week, Lewis wrote to Owen Barfield,
Terrible things are happening to me. The “Spirit” or “Real I” is showing an alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and behaving just like God. You’d better come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery. (Letter to Owen Barfield, February 3, 1930)
And so, in the opening weeks of 1930, C.S. Lewis was seeking chastity, fighting anger, struggling with the possibility of a personal God, and finding fresh and delicious glimpses of Joy. In the spring of 1930, Lewis finally “gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps … the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England” (Surprised by Joy).3
Around the time of this conversion to theism, C.S. Lewis wrote a letter to Arthur Greeves which, due to a section of the letter that has been destroyed, turns out to be one of the most mysterious letters that survives. On April 3, 1930, Lewis wrote that
Minto has very generously invited W. to make his home with us henceforward when he is on leave. They like one another and I hope, as W. gets broken in to domestic life, they may come to do so still more—but in the interval there is a ticklish time ahead and in any case it is a big sacrifice of our
On this page in the letter, Arthur Greeves wrote in pencil “VERY PRIVATE” and “TO BE BURNT.” The bottom half of this page as well as the entirety of the next two pages are gone. When the letter resumes, after two and one-half missing pages, the words of Lewis begin abruptly:
have fallen so far below—MYSELF!!! Which is rather like a man repenting of being drunk because it was unworthy of his career as a forger. I hadn’t meant to give you such a dose of myself—but there is hardly any of it that I can say to any one but you and it is a relief to let it out.
It is impossible to know what C.S. Lewis revealed to Arthur Greeves in this letter, but it was sufficiently embarrassing that Arthur felt compelled to destroy it.4
Another letter to Arthur Greeves may provide further evidence that, if there was a sexual relationship, it had ended at some point before the spring of 1930:
I have “fallen” twice since you left after a long period of quite untroubled peace in that respect. Serves me right, for I was beginning to pat myself on the back and even (idiotically) beginning to fancy that I had really escaped, if not for good, at any rate for an indefinite time. The interesting thing was that on both occasions the temptation arose when I was almost asleep, quite suddenly, and carried me by storm before I really had my waking mind fully about me. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, June 1, 1930)
Although this letter might be interpreted in different ways, Arthur and Jack frequently used “that”—as in “in that respect” or “in that way”—to refer obliquely to sex and in some cases to masturbation (see, for example, letters to Arthur Greeves, May 6, 1917; November 4, 1917; February 21, 1918; April 29, 1930). Whatever the specific implications of this letter, Lewis had practiced some measure of chastity for “a long period of time” by this point. This leads me to think that, if C.S. Lewis and Mrs. Moore did have a sexual relationship, Lewis may have ended the sexual aspect of the relationship at or perhaps prior to the time of his conversion to theism, not at the point of his conversion to Christianity, as Hooper suggested.
Four months after he confessed to Arthur how he had “fallen” twice, C.S. Lewis placed his faith in Jesus while riding to Whipsnade Zoo on Sunday, September 28, 1930.5 Eight days after this conversion, C.S. Lewis, Warnie Lewis, Mrs. Moore, and Maureen Moore moved into The Kilns, which they purchased for £3,300 (the equivalent of around £280,000 today, or $370,000).
To reach his upstairs bedroom in The Kilns, Lewis had to pass through Mrs. Moore’s bedroom. At some point, this door was bolted, and the way into Lewis’s bedroom became the outdoor fire escape. Thus, for two decades, Lewis went outside and up the fire escape to enter his own bedroom. By the time that Mrs. Moore died, the key to the lock had been lost and the door was warped, and thus the entire door eventually needed to be replaced.
If indeed an affair did take place, it seems that C.S. Lewis quite literally bolted the door to the past after he became a Christian.
Mrs. Moore seems to have blamed God for the death of Paddy and lived as an atheist even after Jack and Warnie returned to the Christian faith. When Jack and Warnie went to church, she mocked Holy Communion as a “blood feast” (Hooper, C.S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, 714–715), and she was apparently unhappy about Jack’s conversion to Christianity. According to Warnie’s diary, “she nags [Jack] about having become a believer” (December 21, 1933). At the same time, Mrs. Moore was not wholly anti-religious. She gave permission for Maureen to be confirmed, and she was present for her daughter’s first communion.
Despite the end of their earlier relationship, Lewis continued to care for Mrs. Moore all the way to her point of death. According to Walter Hooper, Lewis
thought that his penance should be… looking after that lady for the rest of his life… But you can see that this is part of his penance… and I think that penance went as far as he could, right up until he visited her everyday even in the nursing home.
Mrs. Moore passed away on January 12, 1951. She is buried in the grave of her friend Alice Hamilton in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church in Headington, the same cemetery in which Warnie and C.S. Lewis are buried.
Even after her death, C.S. Lewis continued to hold out in hope for Mrs. Moore’s ultimate salvation. He prayed for her and asked others to join him in these prayers (see, for example, letter to Arthur Greeves, January 31, 1951). So great was his hope that, according to his vicar Ronald Head, Lewis included her name on the list of the faithful departed on All Souls’ Day.
3. “Careful and Sensible” Eros: Jack and Joy, from Civil Union to Christian Union
By 1955, C.S. Lewis suggested to Arthur Greeves that he no longer experienced sexual desire. Thus he was untroubled by the thought that marrying divorcée Joy Davidman Gresham might constitute an adulterous relationship. Joy was dying of cancer; in Lewis’s thinking, adultery would take place only if their union was consummated, which it certainly would not be, given her impending death and his lack of desire. “The ‘reality’ wd. be, from my point of view, adultery and therefore mustn’t happen. (An easy resolution when one doesn’t in the least want it!)” (letter to Arthur Greeves, October 30, 1955). Even after his civic marriage to Joy on April 23, 1959, Lewis continued to insist that his friends must
not think that anything wrong is going to happen. Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man. What I am mainly acquiring is two (nice) stepsons. (Letter to Dorothy Sayers, December 24, 1956)
Jack was elderly and Joy was dying, so eros was neither possible nor desirable in his view. On March 21, 1957, C.S. Lewis married Joy in a Christian ceremony in the hospital, still expecting her impending death. A few weeks later, Joy moved into The Kilns, presumably to die, and Lewis’s perspective on their union persisted.
But, of course, her death did not come as quickly as everyone had expected.
The cancer went into remission, Joy grew more and more active, Jack’s osteoporosis began to improve, and the nature of their relationship began to change. By April 1958, C.S. Lewis had asked his physician and fellow Inkling Robert “Humphrey” Havard whether it was advisable for a fifty-nine-year-old man with high blood pressure to engage in sexual intercourse. Dr. Havard assured him it was certainly possible as long as they were “careful and sensible”—without spelling out what exactly would constitute careful and sensible sex.6 Yet there is little doubt, particularly from letters written by Joy, that they enjoyed a sexual relationship during these months. In the relative health that they enjoyed together for this brief time, they even went on a belated honeymoon in Northern Ireland as well as a tour of Greece.
There are aspects of the marriage of Jack and Joy Lewis that trouble me. Joy manipulated certain aspects of her estrangement from her previous husband, and C.S. Lewis entered into their union by wrongly treating a civil marriage as something less than an actual marriage. At the same time, Joy’s previous husband did undoubtedly commit adultery, probably on a number of occasions, and Jack embraced a Christian marriage with Joy in due time. Despite their failures and the strangeness of their union, an authentic and beautiful Christian marriage was forged between them.
“And everything you are was making/My heart into a bridge,” C.S. Lewis once said in a sonnet. In the end, Joy Davidman Gresham Lewis did transform the heart of a man whose experiences of eros had been marked by perversion and perhaps adultery into a bridge that led them both to a taste of eros as God designed it. Thus Lewis learned that eros only flourishes in obedience to God. Eros “needs help; therefore needs to be ruled. The god dies or becomes a demon unless he obeys God” (The Four Loves). Lewis seems to have experienced eros both as god and as demon, but then eventually by the grace of Christ as a gift.
Perhaps this twisted fascination that marked Lewis’s desires at eighteen years of age explains his discussion of roughness in erotic play in The Four Loves—a discussion that has always struck me as a little odd and strained. According to Lewis in The Four Loves, such acts within the marriage bed are temporary enactments, limited to that context, of the cosmic reality of utter submission to the sovereign divine. “A man would have to be the coxcomb of all coxcombs, and indeed a blasphemer, if he arrogated to himself, as the mere person he is, the sort of sovereignty to which Venus for a moment exalts him. But what cannot lawfully be yielded or claimed can be lawfully enacted. Outside this ritual or drama he and she are two immortal souls, two free-born adults, two citizens” (The Four Loves). It could be that Lewis saw his earlier inclinations as a perversion of the “enactments” that he described in The Four Loves.
There are other circumstantial anomalies that might also suggest a sexual affair. In his diary, Lewis frequently referred to Mrs. Moore using the Greek letter delta (Δ), which Warnie changed to “D” when typing the journal, since there was no Δ on his typewriter keyboard (Walter Hooper, ed., All My Road before Me, 10). For Lewis, the Δ might have implied Δημητηρ, goddess of the hearth, or more likely Δέσποινα, the female despot of the house. The letter might also plausibly have suggested Διοτιμα, the figure in Plato’s Symposium who instructed Socrates on the nature of eros. This same diary regularly highlights moments when Maureen and other guests were gone and “Δ and I were alone,” with their aloneness explicitly described despite being implied by the absence of others (see, for example, All My Road before Me, January 19, 1923). It is possible that some distinct meaning might have been associated with his references to being “alone” with “Δ,” a meaning that Lewis might have intended to remain hidden. However, this must be recognized as speculation, not evidence.
In Surprised by Joy, Lewis gives the date incorrectly as 1929 instead of 1930.
Later in the same month, Lewis also wrote a poem that included these lines:
When Lilith means to draw me/Within her hungry bower/She does not overawe me/With beauty’s pomp and power,/Nor with angelic grace/Of courtesy and the pace/Of gliding ship comes veil’d at evening hour./Eager, unmasked, she lingers,/Heart shaken and heartsore:/With hot, dry, jewelled fingers/Outstretched, beside her door,/Offers, with gnawing haste,/Her cup, whereof who taste/(She promises no better) thirst far more. (Letter to Arthur Greeves, April 29, 1930)
Was C.S. Lewis reflecting on the ways in which he was seeking not to return to Mrs. Moore’s “bower”? Or was this more broadly about his struggle with chastity?
Disagreeing with Alister McGrath on the chronology of C.S. Lewis’s conversion, I place the date of his conversion as September 28, 1931, not June 7, 1932, as McGrath suggests. As McGrath correctly notes, there could not have been blooming “bluebells underfoot” in September since bluebells bloom only in spring. However, Lewis’s reference in Surprised by Joy to “bluebells underfoot” was intended, in my view, to form a literary connection to the “Blue Flower” referenced earlier in Surprised by Joy, thus creating an inclusio that framed his conversion. Either (1) Lewis conflated two trips to the zoo for literary purposes, or (2) he referred to “harebells” (which could have been in bloom in September) as “bluebells,” misidentifying them (intentionally or unintentionally) for literary purposes.
Joy spoke of her relationship with Jack in ways that, quite characteristically for her, bordered on inappropriate. For references to Joy’s letters and comments, see Abigail Santamaria, Joy, 310–328.