C. S. Lewis and a chronicle of the Moores.

Hayes, John

The course of C. S. Lewis's life (b. 29 November 1898) was deeply affected by the death in action of Edward Francis Courtenay Moore (b. 17 November 1898) at Pargny in France on 24 March, 1918. Lewis and Moore had met when inducted into the University Officer's Training Corps of the British army in 1917, and formed a friendship that Lewis was to honour in the extreme.

However, details of Moore's Irish family background are scanty in the Lewis biographies, (1) especially as regards his father. The object of this article is to give some more information on that matter, with a view to better telling the story to which it belongs, a story integral to Lewis's personal history. When teaching English Literature, Lewis was accustomed to dismiss the relevance of biographical considerations. However, it is the case that Lewis's own oeuvre is clearly and profoundly linked to the life-commitments about which he became close to belligerently frank, even in academic settings, where such was frowned upon. Further, he wrote two autobiographical memoirs, the first Surprised by Joy (1955) that made measured disclosures about his early life, and the second, A Grief Observed (1961), (2) that is a searing revelation of his reaction to the death of his wife. Perhaps these facts give sufficient leave to proceed as planned.

The particular biographical lacuna I have identified may have arisen from the fact that Moore's father (Courtenay Edward Moore, b. 26 June 1870) had separated from his wife, after eleven years of married life in 1908, when their children were still very young. Their son, who was to die in battle, was then ten years old and his sister, Maureen Daisy Helen (b. 19 August 1906, d. 15 February 1997), just two. Thereafter, Moore lived in Ireland--it seems in County Wicklow to begin with--while his wife and children took up what proved to be permanent residence in England. This may have led to amnesia about the father in his family and corresponding indifference by biographers to him. After all, of what possible relevance could he be?

However, what is immediately striking about the Moore family background is how similar it is to that of the Lewis. In summary, the two families were Irish, (3) Anglican, (4) markedly clerical, (5) and literary. However, because of the historical forces affecting persons of that background--culminating in the seismic effects of the Great War, overlapped by Irish moves towards independence--it was a background whose power to sustain had become problematic at the time the two young men were growing up.

Moore's mother moved to Bristol, after her marriage broke down, partly so that her children could enjoy what she regarded as superior educational opportunities. For their part, Lewis's parents thought it best to send both their sons to England to be educated and C. S. Lewis, the younger, enrolled in Wynyard School in Hertfordshire in 1908, shortly before his mother died (on 23 August of that year).

This double separation left the young boy with a profound sense of loss. It seems to have had the effect of locking behind secure doors, in conscious and sub-conscious memory, an Irish childhood in which he enjoyed 'humdrum, prosaic happiness'. (6) However, it is not easy to accept this modest description of his early emotional life since much of his writing seems to be driven--but also enriched by--a powerful need to find a key to re-enter the mind of the child. He was dedicated to this project and had an quite extraordinary facility for it. It is easy to assume that here he found a safe retreat from the everyday, frequently oppressive, life that was to be his lot after the early loss of his mother.

The story to be told concerns Edward Moore's sister, Maureen, but as she and her mother made a home with Lewis for many years, he is closely involved in it. It is well known and has had already had several re-tellings. However, whatever the differing viewpoints that inform the telling, or the additions to the detail, as herein, Lewis, gave it the imprimatur of calling it a 'fairytale'. (7) It had, and has, the special quality of incongruity that is evocative of the wonder that attached to the parallel imaginative universes he delighted in creating, and in accordance with a sensibility he early discovered was 'romantic'. (8)

It is a story, as such stories typically are, of the overcoming of adversity, an adversity connected in this case with striking intrafamilial emotional disturbance. However, it would be strange to ignore altogether a link between this disturbance and the fate of a social class in Ireland, that of the Anglo-Irish, in the first decades of the twentieth century century--a fate that was to threaten mortally its social ascendancy, and the security perceived as provided by it. To be sure, this manifested itself more devastatingly in the South (where the Moores resided) than in Belfast, where Lewis's father was to live alone, in increasing isolation, until his death. In any case, it was a country, which many of their kind felt they had to put behind them. (9)

This tale is true to the genre in that the perhaps biased record of the behaviour of the absent father, C. E. Moore, and what nevertheless transpired in his separated family, illustrates the lesson that an ill-disposed person may well not succeed in controlling the intended effect of their actions on other persons. This sits well with what Lewis appreciated about children's fantasy literature: it provided the child with the assurance that all will be well and so is provocative of trust. In time, it came to be seen by him as having a pre-evangelizing function--a function he also saw being discharged in primitive societies by the legends, sagas, and myths, of which he made an academic study. The link between the two is that the childish urge to fantasize reprises the childhood of mankind; ontogeny re-plays phylogeny sharing the emotion of wonder. The re-assurance, which such narratives give, rests on the possibility of another world, over and above the obvious physical one, that is disposed to play a benign role in respect of human affairs. It seemed plausible to Lewis that a spontaneous appreciation through the ages of an aperture to the transcendent assisted the historical acceptance of Christianity at its inception. Further, this appreciation comes naturally to children. (10) By developing their fantasy, suitable literature can play a propaedeutic role in disposing children more easily to entertain the possibility, and even the plausibility, of the Christian story, with its quadraphonic Gospel narratives of other-worldly intervention. (11)

A Christian commitment served to integrate Lewis's quite diverse authorial ventures over the course of his long and active writing life but he did not come to it, nor was it sustained, without a prolonged struggle. By the time he met Paddy Moore, Lewis was telling anyone who cared to know that he was an agnostic or, more often, an atheist. (12) Certainly, his experience in the Somme, with its proverbial foxholes, did not make him a theist. In particular, he continued to reject the Christianity that he had his first experience of in the parish of which his maternal grandfather was Rector. (13) Lewis came to see Christianity as no different from other religions; it was a mythology of a kind with the Norse sagas which early fascinated him.

However, as Lewis perused the canonical texts for his degree programmes, and later when he began to tutor in Oxford, he found it harder and harder to resist the evidence of his reading that it was religiously committed authors who provided a compelling sense of depth that he missed in other writers. Relevant too was the impression made on him by a friend who had been a fellow student in Oxford after the war. He was Nevill Coghill (b. 1898) from Castletownshend, County Cork, nephew of the author, Edith O. Somerville. Lewis and Coghill shared an interest in mediaeval literature. Each achieved a first class honours degree in the School of English Language and Literature in 1923. That Coghill, 'clearly the most intelligent and best-informed man in that class--was a Christian and thoroughgoing supernaturalist' (14) challenged Lewis deeply.

Another shock awaited him in the person of Harry Weldon, tutor and college lecturer in the Greats (Classical Philosophy), the Magdalen College resident cynic, who believed (as Lewis put in the mouth of one of his fictional characters based on Weldon), that 'he has seen through everything and lives at rock bottom'. Nevertheless, and despite a century of hegemonic German biblical criticism, (15) Weldon said: 'Rum thing, that stuff of [Sir James G.] Fraser's [in The Golden Bough] about the Dying God [...] It almost looks as if it really happened once'. (16)

However, the decisive influence that Lewis experienced as a lifting of the scales from his eyes was a conversation with his friend, the now equally celebrated, J. R. R. Tolkien. Tolkien allowed Lewis his classification of religions, including Christianity, as 'mythologies' but pointed out that that did not make them lies. On the contrary, he saw them as pointing to the truth, although in varying degrees and complex ways. As such, Tolkien believed they came from God and that, in particular, 'the Christian story was a myth invented by a God who was real, a God whose dying could transform those who believed in him'. (17)

Lewis mulled over these thoughts in the midst of coping with his father's death (25 September 1929), without the assistance of his only sibling, his brother Warren Hamilton Lewis (b. 27 August 1895), known as 'Warnie', who was in Shanghai on a military mission. One evening, on the bus coming home from College, Lewis had some kind of religious experience. This was followed, shortly afterwards, by conversion--in an equally mundane and transitory setting. On 22 September 1932, he sat in the side-car while his brother drove him to the Safari Zoo at Whipsnade, and as he told it: 'when we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and when we reached the zoo I did.' (18)

This did not mean that Lewis accepted Tolkien's Roman Catholicism. Instead, to Tolkien's chagrin, according to White, 'Lewis returned to his roots, to a form of Irish Protestantism.' (19) However it is difficult to see how his subsequent preference for High Church ritual and practice can be described as a form of Irish Protestantism, as practised in the strongly 'low' Church of Ireland at the time. What is true is that he seems to have persisted in the anti-Roman Catholic prejudices with which he was probably imbued in childhood. (20)

From the time of his embrace of Christianity, his hitherto dilatory (21) writing career, very quickly accelerated and his bibliography, at its close, was both large in number and comprehensive of many diverse subject areas. It covered academic explorations in mediaeval and Renaissance English literature (most enduringly in English Literature in the Sixteenth Century [1954]), science fiction (most significantly, 'the Ransom trilogy', depicting a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil), children's literature (most notably, the seven-volume series The Chronicles of Narnia from 1950 onwards), and direct and vigorous advocacy of Christianity and its theology (most successfully in the Screwtape Letters [1942]), augmented by devotional literature (as in Letters to Malcolm [1964]). This pivotal apologetic was, finally, reinforced by the autobiographies, already mentioned. As a Christian, he believed that over time, or, failing that, in eternity, 'all manner of things will be well'. (22) Clearly, this did not preclude the experience of the battle with evil being 'a damn serious business [...] the nearest run thing you ever saw'. (23)

In what now follows we are given an opportunity to employ, pari passu, an extended version of William Trevor's thesis that 'fiction insists on universality, then equally insists that a degree of parochialism can often best achieve this.' (24) What I want to do is to apply this idea not to fiction--for, after all, our story is not strictly a fiction, 'fairytale' appellation notwithstanding--but to biography and history with reference to, in large part, the unfolding lives of a quintessentially parochial family. In this exploration, we shall surely find confirmed, yet again, Byron's view that 'truth is always strange; Stranger than fiction'. (25)

Clive Staples Lewis was offered a scholarship to University College, Oxford in December 1916. Although he failed his first examinations (the 'Responsions') in March 1917, he was allowed to take up residence in the College to cram for a second attempt. Meanwhile, he began military training under the auspices of the UOTC and in June was billeted at Keble College, Oxford. He was assigned to share a room with Moore, 'who had just left Clifton College in Bristol' (26) on the basis of the proximity of the first letter of their surnames in the alphabet. This led to a friendship formed over the very short time they were given to prepare for war in the trenches. It was, nevertheless, sufficiently deep to change the course of Lewis's domestic life for many years to come. Such an outcome is surprising not only because of the brevity of their acquaintance but because, to begin with, at any rate, Lewis found his room-mate 'a little too childish and virtuous for "common nature's daily food"', albeit a 'good fellow'. (27)

Naturally, the two young men shared an uncertainty about their fate in the warfare they were being prepared (inadequately) to engage in. One minor detail they had in common--that neither man was called by his baptismal name--can serve (as it pertained to Moore) to signal their similarity of background. C. S. Lewis was known to his intimates as 'Jack' or 'Jacks' and Moore was called 'Paddy'. However, while Lewis chose his forename himself from the name of a favourite dog at about the age of four, (28) Moore's sobriquet was most likely ascribed by others because his family was Irish. (29) More particularly, they had in common that each had grandparents who were clergymen in the (Anglican) Church of Ireland--Lewis on his mother's side and Moore on both his parents' sides. Lastly, Moore's paternal family included among their number, as did Lewis's, persons of literary aspiration and (modest) accomplishment.

Paddy Moore was grandson of the Rev Courtenay Moore, originally from Rosnashane, Ballymoney, County Antrim (b. 25 March 1840), sixth son of a doctor. After graduating from Trinity College Dublin, Courtenay Moore was ordained in 1866 and although a Northerner, was to spend the rest of his life in the south of the island, chiefly in North Cork. His first curacy was in the parish of Brigown (Mitchelstown, County Cork), a parish of about 200 souls in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. (30) During that incumbency he married Jessie Mona Duff, daughter of Captain Benjamin Duff of the 92nd Gordon Highlanders and Emma Haines on 15 April, 1869 at Bakewell, Derbyshire, England. Courtenay Edward, Paddy Moore's father, was their first child. This primogeniture, and the fact that Mrs Moore was to be the only Duff daughter to have children, had a consequence that is key to this story.

The Moores had four other children--three daughters (one of whom died as an infant) and another son (who became a clergyman in the Church of Ireland). (31) One of the Moore daughters, Jessie Louisa (b. 1876, d. 1957), was to make a mark as a popular novelist. A non-conforming child of the glebe, she had divorced her husband, Robert Ackland, to marry a Roman Catholic, Victor G. H. Rickard, an army officer who went on to command the Second Battalion of the Royal Munster Fusiliers. Unfortunately, Lieutenant Colonel Rickard died in a fruitless attempt to take Aubers Ridge in the second battle of Ypres. (32) One account records that 381 of a total of 800 men in the battalion were lost. (33) As 'Mrs Victor Rickard', Louie went on to publish more than thirty novels. (34) There is a local memory in Mitchelstown that one of these, Ascendancy House, had to be withdrawn for fear of libel action by townspeople who believed they were identifiable in the book. (35) A character in another novel, A Bird of Strange Plumage (1927), was based on a close friend, the salonier Hazel, Lady Lavery, American wife of the prominent British society painter. (36)

Courtenay Moore, father of Louisa and Courtenay Edward, was an exceptionally able man, who was much respected both within and outside the Anglican communion. He advocated change in respect of Irish land tenure--a particularly agitated question in his parish community during the late nineteenth century--Home Rule, (37) and the fostering of Gaelic, in public lectures and articles. While he published two novels, his deepest interest was in antiquarian matters. He was one of the founders of the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society and was, for a time, vice-president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries in Ireland.

While pursuing his various interests and editing for six years (1893-97) the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette--the newspaper of the Anglican communion in Ireland--he found the time to make many positive contributions to his adopted town. He had returned there as Rector of Brigown in 1882 after appointments elsewhere. These were from 1871 to 75 in neighbouring Farahy (parish of the novelist Elizabeth Bowen) (38) and then, Castletownroche (1875-82). He involved himself in the renovation of St George's parish church, and the archaeology and restoration of the monastic site in Brigown. He was a member of the local technical education committee, a director of the Mitchelstown and Fermoy Light Railway Company (which began to run in 1891), and chaired the meeting that led to the establishment of a golf club in 1910. (39) The stress of coping with the sequelae to an accidental fire in the rectory (40) seems to have precipitated a decline in his health. He retired in 1916 to Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire), living at 7 Royal Terrace East, where he died on 10 June 1922. (41) All in all, it was a life marked by productive community involvement. He made enlightened responses to the forces, economic and cultural, that were shaping Ireland during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He seems to have understood that these forces were undermining the colonial political economy of the ascendancy class, represented locally by the landlord, King family, that had been the backbone of the (then recently disestablished) Church, which he served.

It appears that the otherwise admirable Canon Courtenay Moore did not take kindly to his daughter's divorce and re-marriage; she was not a beneficiary of his will. The marriage in 1897 of his eldest son to Jane King Askins (b. 28 March 1872) also failed. C.S. Lewis first met Mrs Jane Moore, and her daughter Maureen, at Oxford, where they were staying to be close to Paddy prior to his going to war. The family home at that time was 56 Ravenswood Road, Redlands, Bristol--a city chosen after marital separation, not only because, as already mentioned, Mrs Moore wished to give educational opportunities to her children but also because she had a brother working there. He was Dr John Askins, (42) a medical officer who had married an American.

Like the family of her husband, the Askins were a clerical family with roots in the North of Ireland. This was also the case with Lewis's maternal family: his mother's father had been Vicar of Dunamy in County Armagh. By her early twenties, both Janie Askins' parents were dead and she had to take on the care of four younger siblings. George Sayer suggests that this care made her 'autocratic'. (43)

Her separated husband was referred to by his wife as 'the Beast' chiefly because of his inconstant provision for her and his family. Presumably, Courtenay Edward Moore was not without resources as he was a civil engineer by profession. According to the Lewis biographer, A. N. Wilson, his whereabouts was 'somewhere in Ireland'. (44) Janie Moore became a kind of surrogate mother to Jack, who called her 'Mother' or 'Minto'--an appellation matched by her 'Boysie' for him. Perhaps he was particularly susceptible to such a relationship as his birth mother, Flora, had died, as already noted, when he was nine and, besides, at the time he got to know the Moore family he was not on good terms with his father. A particular attraction for Lewis was 'ordinary domestic life as lived by most people' (45)--an experience that had ended for him with the death of his mother. The commonality of background, previously mentioned, also probably facilitated the intensity of the unusual personal dynamic that developed between Janie Moore and Jack Lewis.

Paddy Moore and Lewis were gazetted to different regiments in October 1917. By November, Jack was in the trenches near Arras. He succumbed to trench fever (pyrexia), which has flu-like symptoms, and was transferred to a French hospital. After his return to the front, Lewis was wounded in a 'friendly fire' incident; he was injured by shrapnel from an exploding British shell that killed a companion standing beside him. On his repatriation in May 1918, Mrs Moore visited Lewis in hospital and Lewis chose to convalesce near Clifton, conveniently close to her Bristol home. She was at the time extremely worried about the fate of her son 'Paddy' who had been reported missing in action. In fact, it is alleged she did not learn of his death in battle in March until September 1918. (46) Paddy Moore received a Military Cross posthumously for 'conspicuous gallantry and initiative'. (47) With the news, a solemn pledge that the two eighteen-year old soldiers had made during their time together came into effect: if one survived the war, he would 'look after' the other's active parent.

Lewis was to take this pledge extremely seriously. This was aided by his attraction to Mrs Moore, an attraction, as already pointed out, reciprocated by her. For her part, this attraction was deepened in light of the fact that, as she wrote to Lewis's father, of the group of 'boys', whom she had got to know through her son, only Lewis survived. Janie and Maureen Moore came to live in Oxford when Lewis returned to resume his undergraduate studies there in 1919. From Lewis's frugal allowance, courtesy of his father, he provided a substantial amount of the support (at first in a succession of rented houses in east Oxford) they normally might have expected from Courtenay Edward Moore. Back in Belfast, Lewis's father was understandably none too pleased with the relationship, not least its financial implications.

When Albert Lewis learned that his assumption that Mrs Moore was a widow was false and that his son was partly subsidizing her, he wrote to his elder son, Warnie, a career army officer. Albert began by stating that although he had been told that Moore was a 'scoundrel', 'the absent are always to blame'. (48) Primed by the experience of a life-time spent as a solicitor pleading cases in the Belfast Police Crown Court, he raised the possibility of blackmail by the 'scoundrel' Moore; this was at a time when a suspicion of irregularity in a man's relationship with a person of the opposite sex could easily have spoiled the alleged offender's career prospects, at least in middle-class occupations. Warnie dismissed the possibility because he knew his undergraduate brother had not 'enough money to make [blackmail] a paying risk' (49) and he urged his father to be encouraged by the fact that Mrs Moore had a husband and so was not free to marry.

For her part, Mrs Moore was deeply concerned that her husband would not agree to divorce her. His refusal condemned her and her daughter to 'near poverty' (50) and she wanted 'to have a fair share of his income'. (51) Ironically, assuming that his intentions were to deprive her, Courtenay Edward Moore might well have been able to avoid or mitigate such a payment on their divorce by invoking the relationship between his wife and Lewis. Presumably his determination to break off all ties meant he did not know about her joint living arrangements with his son's friend.

Lewis continued to subsidize the Moores after he was appointed to an academic post at Magdalen College, Oxford. He had already developed the habit of lodging in his rooms in College during the week in term time and, otherwise, living with the Moores. In 1930, Mrs Moore and the Lewis brothers, Jack and Warnie, bought a house jointly. (52) This was 'The Kilns', Headington Quarry, a nine-acre property, previously the site of a brick-making works, about three miles from Magdalen. Warnie did not come to live there until 1932 when, by then aged thirty-seven, he retired early from the army with the rank of captain. Thereafter he occupied himself (service in World War II excluded) as family archivist, historian of seventeenth-century France, secretary to his brother, and severe critic of Mrs Moore. Many agreed with him that she had always been 'difficult'; (53) in the last period of her life, she was senile.

Janie King Moore died on 12 January 1951. Her husband, Courtenay Edward Moore, died in Dublin on 9 June of the same year. (54) He had been operated on for colon cancer and there had been post-operative complications. His place of residence is given on his death certificate as 16 Rathdown Park in the suburb of Terenure. (55) His 'condition' was given, as 'widower'; he and Janie had never divorced.

One of the most extraordinary aspects of this story is that the Cork father of such unhappy memory was, in the end, to be instrumental in conveying a substantial legacy to his daughter, Maureen. In February 1963, Maureen (56) inherited a baronetcy that had originally been created by Queen Anne in 1706. This fell to her by virtue of a blood-line that, most exceptionally, allowed of passage through female descendants in her case, courtesy of her father's mother, Jessie Mona Moore (nee Duff). Following the death of Sir George Cospatrick Duff-Sutherland-Dunbar, 7th Baronet, Maureen, his second cousin, was recognized by Lyon Court as Dame Maureen Daisy Helen Dunbar, 8th Baronetess of Hempriggs. She thereby also inherited the family estate, Ackergill Tower, near Wick in Caithness, in the north east of Scotland and went to live there. Had her elder brother, Paddy Moore, lived, he would have inherited instead.

According to her obituarist, when Maureen visited her surrogate elder brother, Jack Lewis, in July 1963, he had become so ill that he sometimes even failed to recognize his visitors. Nevertheless, he greeted her as 'Lady Dunbar'. 'Oh, Jack', she exclaimed, 'how could you remember that?' 'On the contrary', he replied, 'how could I forget a fairy tale?' (57)

We may ask whether in making this remark, and had he been able (which given his condition he was not) to reflect on its significance, Lewis would still have wanted the tale to bear the theological freight that he had once placed on the fairytale genre. (58) He had had in 1948 what he experienced both as a bruising and losing encounter in a home ground debate at a meeting of the Socratic Club at Oxford. His opponent was Elizabeth Anscombe, a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein (who was that year living in Ireland). She was to be a pioneer in changing the way philosophy was conceived of, and taught, at Oxford after the war, with tools honed in Cambridge by Wittgenstein, building on the work of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell. During the course of the evening, it became clear to Lewis that the new wave had decisively over-turned the Idealism, into which he had himself been initiated, as an under-graduate. This had been developed in a sustained meditation on G. W. Hegel's thought and articulated at Oxford by E H. Bradley of Merton College. With it, the irenic co-habitation of faith and reason he had relied on, became untenable. This had been based on the existence, and complementarity, of two orders, the seen and the unseen. Each order was underwritten, by a God, whose existence was rationally arguable from the empirical phenomena that were available to embodied human beings--a position, he thought (wrongly) that Anscombe had denied. He never again published theological work, turning to novels instead, but it is clear from the way he handled the diagnosis and death from cancer in 1960 of his wife that he did not lose faith. The good God was, however, in his view now accessible only by intuition, not reason. (59)

Belief in a hidden God, against the grain of experience, was what was in any case on offer in the mid-twentieth century. Given the cascade of horrors that mankind had inflicted on itself during that period, it appeared to many that prayers of petition to God to 'deliver us from evil' seemed like letters marked: 'return to sender, address unknown'. Thus, in his own household, Janie Moore had felt distinctly uncomfortable with Lewis's conversion. (60) The atheism she had shared with him, no doubt, had deep connections with the trauma of the loss of her son, Lewis's friend--a loss that had been, however, the occasion of her long association with Lewis.

Janie did not survive long enough to learn of the luck of her daughter Maureen but she can hardly have been unaware of how the way of life into which she had been born had been so disrupted that many no longer felt comfortable in the land of their birth. (61) Through three generations, the Lewis's had made their way from Wales, to Cork, to Dublin, to Belfast and finally back to the neighbouring island. Over the same period, the Moores' circumnavigation went in the opposite direction: from the North to Cork and, at least in the persons of Canon Moore's grand-children, Maureen and Paddy, to an England, for which the boy gave his life. With his life went whatever contribution he might have made, perhaps literary (like his friend Lewis), in accordance with the marked Moore family talents. Foregone also were the title and estate that fell by default to his sister.

The predicament of those left behind in Ireland, particularly in the Free State, has been well described by William Trevor: 'I was born into a minority that all my life has seemed in danger of withering away'. (62) Trevor discovered an advantage in that because it gave him a viewpoint useful for an artist but others did not find it so. One can, in contrast, imagine the conflict of loyalties that accompanied the spiritual journey of Paddy Moore's aunt, the author, Louie Rickard, who, widowed in the war, took the extreme step of converting to Roman Catholicism. It is likely that at least her own people, resentful of the effect of the Catholic Ne Temere decree governing the religious up-bringing of the children of mixed marriages, would have seen this as a more apt emblem of what was widely experienced as a communal 'death of the heart' (in Elizabeth Bowen's phrase), than was the good fortune of Lady Dunbar.

We may well be left with a sense of nostalgia for a receding past--a past that should have been better ordered so as to bequeath a peaceful and more culturally enriched island. There was, instead, the precipitation into chaos of the Civil War and the re-ignition of the 'troubles'. Lewis, in face of all of this, continued 'as it were a sparrow: that sitteth alone upon the house-top' (Psalm, 102:7) to semaphore what he had come to see as pivotal: to adapt a quotation, much favoured by the Irish-American President with whom he shared his day of death (22 November, 1963), that we should not ask what God can do for us but what we can do for God in the person of our neighbour. That path leads to 'the same delight in God that made David dance'. (63)

NOTES

(1.) Readers are referred to Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Collins, 1974); George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988; London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2005); A. N. Wilson, C. S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Collins, 1990); Michael White, C. S. Lewis: The Boy who Chronicled Narnia (London: Abacus, 2005); Douglas Gresham, Jack's Life: The Story of C. S. Lewis (Nashville: Broadman & Holman, 2005).

(2.) This slim volume begins: 'No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing' (London: Faber and Faber), p.5.

(3.) In the autobiography of his early life, Surprised by Joy (London, Fontana, 1959), Lewis emphasized the influence in his home of the relicts of the Welsh sensibility of his grandfather at the expense of the ambient Irish one.

(4.) The Lewis family began its association with the Church of Ireland in Jack Lewis's father's generation.

(5.) There was a soupcon of other middle class professions, for example, law and engineering.

(6.) See Surprised by Joy, p.12.

(7.) I suppose the Irish can claim to be brand-leaders in writing about 'faeries' and indeed, Lewis was much taken by James Stephens's The Crock of Gold. Lewis ranked it with the Aberdeenshire minister George MacDonald's Phantastes, for him high praise indeed.

(8.) See Surprised by Joy, p.10.

(9.) The ensuing ambivalence can be caught in the contrasting views about Ireland recorded when Jack Lewis and his brother surveyed the Waterford coastline from a ship in 1932: While Jack saw a land 'more calm and spacious and celestial' than any other, his brother wrote in his diary that 'there is something wrong with this country [...] a vague sense of something mean and cruel and sinister', quoted in Sayer, p.247.

(10.) Every effort was made to protect a fairy-tree at Drumoland, County Clare during the recent building of the Ennis by-pass, but these efforts were stymied by a person who cut it down at night. In Iceland, a government inspector has to certify prospective industrial sites as 'elf free'.

(11.) Sayer relates that Lewis said to him, with reference to his stories for children: 'I am aiming at a sort of pre-baptism of the child's imagination' (p.318).

(12.) He is more properly characterized at the time before his conversion to Christianity as a natural contemplative, who found the conventional religion of his day unsatisfactory.

(13.) He was the Rev. Thomas Hamilton (b. 1826), Rector of St. Mark, Dundela, Belfast, noted for his virulent anti-Catholicism. He kept a detailed journal of his adventures as a naval chaplain in the Crimean war, which his grandson admire. He married Mary Warren from a prominent Scottish Planter family. Their second daughter, Florence, was C. S. Lewis's mother.

(14.) Surprised by Joy, p.170.

(15.) The most influential biblical critic of the early twentieth century was Rudolf Bultmann. He sharply distinguished between the 'Jesus of History' (who was not susceptible of historical investigation) and the Christ of Faith (who could still be an object of worship).

(16.) See Sayer, p.222.

(17.) Sayer, p.226.

(18.) Quoted in Sayer, p.226.

(19.) White, p.149.

(20.) White (p.111) writes that Lewis and his brother often referred to Irish Catholics as 'bog trotters'. He also recounts how the Catholic publishing house, Sheed and Ward, thinking that Lewis was a Roman Catholic, asked permission to issue his 1933 book, describing his post-conversion view on the many philosophical and theological positions he had entertained on his way back to Christianity, The Pilgrim's Regress. Lewis was not happy to co-operate with publishers of their ilk but the lure of commercial success overcame his scruples and he was, as he said, duly 'well punished' for his greed as Sheed and Ward printed a blurb that implied that Lewis was attacking his Ulster roots. White quotes Lewis as protesting saying that 'this was a damnable lie told to try to make the Dublin riffraff buy the book' (p.111).

(21.) 'At the age of thirty-seven he had published only two works of poetry, an allegorical work of Christian apologetics (The Pilgrim's Regress) and a single work of scholarship, The Allegont of Love: A Study in Mediaeval Tradition [...] During the remaining twenty-seven years of his life Lewis published no fewer than thirty-eight books' (White, p.98).

(22.) Juliana of Norwich, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love (1393), Chapter 27. Her affirmation is quoted by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, Little Gidding V. I am grateful for these references to my friend, emeritus Professor Harmon L. Smith, Duke University, North Carolina, now Vicar of St Mark's, Roxboro, North Carolina.

(23.) This is how the Irish-born Duke of Wellington recalled the battle of Waterloo.

(24.) William Trevor, Excursions in the Real Worht (London: Penguin, 1993), p.xi.

(25.) Don Juan, edited by T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W.W. Pratt (London: Penguin, 2004), c. xiv, ci.

(26.) White, p.49.

(27.) Letter to Arthur Greeves, quoted in Green and Hooper, p.51.

(28.) Sayer, p.42.

(29.) Furthermore, Moore's father was like Lewis's (Albert James, b. 1863), a Corkman by birth.

(30.) William Trevor described his birthplace (where he is commemorated by a sculpture in the market square) thus: 'Mitchelstown, cut down to size by the towering Galtee mountains and the Knockmealdowns [...] famous for its martyrs [...] a squat little town, looking as though someone had sat on it. A good business town, my father used to say' ('A Dream of Munster's Arcadia', The Sunday Times, 29 March 1992, Book Section, p.9). By the time of Trevor's birth (1928), what he has described as 'Ireland's grandest castle' (in his Foreword to Bill Power, White Knights, Dark Earls [Cork: The Collins Press, 2000]), had been burnt down (in 1922) by retreating local Republican incendiaries. The neo-Gothic building, which provided the planned town with a presiding presence in Courtenay Moore's time, was erected by George, the third Earl of Kingston, in expectation, never fulfilled, of a visit by his friend, King George IV. The ruinous cost to the estate of this and other ventures led to a harsh regime to pass the charge onto the estate's tenants, and this in turn made Mitchelstown a leading centre of agitation for land reform. Apart from Power's account of the variously named Kings/Kingsborough/Kingston family (kin of the King-Harmans of Boyle and Strokestown, County Roscommon), there is Janet Todd's best-selling account of the activities of the eighteenth-century female members of the family, Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798 (London, Penguin, 2004). Visitors' accounts of the Castle and town are collected in Bill Power, Images of Mitchelstown (Fermoy: Mount Cashell, 2002).

(31.) Alexander Duff Moore, Rector of Ballycommon, Co. Kildare (b. 1872, d. ?1938). There is a newspaper record of A. D. Moore and his respective partners being beaten in both the gentlemen's and mixed doubles in a Lawn Tennis tournament held in Mitchelstown in 1891. Apart from 'Louie', his other female siblings were Harriet Emma (b. 1874, d. 1958), and Mona. This information, as well as information on other members of the family, is readily available on the website http//:www.thepeerage.com. It differs from that given by Power, who separates the names 'Harriet' and 'Emma', attributing them to two different persons, and who adds the name Mona, who died in infancy. The Moores donated a stained glass window on the theme of the Good Shepherd to St. George's Church in Mitchelstown in 1904 in memory of this child. See Power, Evensong: The Story of a Church of Ireland Country Parish (Mitchelstown: Mount Cashell Books, 2004), pp.74-5. The Lewis brothers donated a window to St Mark, Dundela, in honour of their parents.

(32.) Colonel Rickard (from Dublin) features prominently (on horseback) in Fortunino Matania's 'Last Absolution of the Munsters', depicting a scene that took place on 8 May 1915, the day before his death. It has been suggested that Matania (1881-1963) may not have been at Ypres on that day and he may have relied on a description provided by Louie Rickard in The Story of the Munsters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915). The original was destroyed in a bombing raid during the Second World War. Matania was an influential Italian illustrator working for the British press during the First World War. See Sean Healy, 'A Prayer before Dying', Cork Holly Bough (Christmas 2008), 14-15.

(33.) Bill Power's Evensong gives different, but equally appalling, numbers of casualties to Healy's: 'Next day, 520 soldiers and 22 officers of the Munsters went into battle. Only three officers and 200 rank and file survived.' See Evensong: The Story of a Church of Ireland Country Parish (Fermoy: Mount Cashell Books), p.89.

(34.) Tim Cadogan and Jeremiah Falvey, A Biographical Dictionary of Cork (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2006), credit her with 'thirty' novels in the entry on her father (p.202) and 'over forty novels' in her own entry (p.290). Whatever their number, her novels, successful in their appeal to contemporary popular taste, did not endure past her own time.

(35.) See Bill Power, Evensong, p.90, for more details.

(36.) Sinead McCoole, Hazel: A Life of Lady Lavery 1880-1935 (Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1996) gives an account of the friendship between Hazel Lavery and Louie Rickard. Sir John Lavery wrote to Louie after Hazel's death in 1935 that 'if a record of her life was to be written, it would have been you she would have chosen to write it' (as quoted in McCoole, p.viii). Their friendship may have been intensified by each (Louie in 1925) having converted in adulthood to Roman Catholicism. Louie Rickard died in Cork in 1963, the same year as her eldest brother and Lewis. She had come to live there after World War II in the home of Denis Gwyun, Research Professor of Modern History at University College, Cork, and grandson of William Smith O'Brien. Gwynn's wife, Alice, whom he married after the death of Louie Rickard, was a daughter of Lady Lavery.

(37.) On the other hand, C. S. Lewis's father, Albert, 'delivered public speeches in Dublin and Ulster arguing strongly against home rule.' See White, p.8.

(38.) It is plausible that Canon Courtenay Moore and some of his family were at the garden party, attended by Bowen, held in Mitchelstown Castle on 5 August 1914, the fateful day England declared war on Germany, and described chillingly by her in Bowen's Court (Cork: Collins Press, 1998) as a social event, destined to be 'a more final scene than we knew' (p.436).

(39.) See Bill Power, Another Side of Mitchelstown, (Mitchelstown: PsyOps Books, 2008), p.44. My grandfather, Cornelius O'Brien (b. 1881; d. 1968), who as a young man, was a member of the Fermoy Board of Guardians, and so in a position to know, told me, as a child, of the good works of Canon Courtenay Moore. Recall of these conversations spurred me to investigate if Courtenay Edward Moore, Lewis's friend, referred to in the biographies, might have been kin of the Rector, but I found no hint of a connection in the local historical literature. However, I have since discovered that the information is readily ascertainable by means of the Google search facility. My grandfather, who was inaugural chairman of the management committee of the Co-operative Agricultural Society (now Dairygold) that started business three years after the Canon retired from the town, gave me an insight into the sense of humiliation felt by the Kingston tenants hopelessly trying to keep up with the estate's escalating demands for rent for land. In a revolutionary turn of the political economy, the co-op took over the remains of the Kingston estate and has left its imprint on it. But, could it have been done in a way that was more sensitive to the past? I do not know for times were hard.

(40.) Power is confusing about the date of this fire. In Evensong, he writes that 'it took place on 11 April 1915' (p.91) but in Another Side of Mitchelstown, he writes that 'Canon Moore retired as rector in 1916 (two weeks after the fire at the Glebe)' (p.44).

(41.) Power, Evensong, gives much more information on Canon Moore than I can offer here; certainly, sufficient material appears to exist to support a monograph. Particularly interesting are the diary entries quoted from his Preacher's Book. The Canon published a memoir in 1908: A Chapter of Irish Church History: Being Some Personal Recollections of Life and Service in the Church of Ireland. Within living memory, there was a person who spoke of being rigorously trained in domestic service in the Moore Rectory.

(42.) Unfortunately, he became mentally ill in 1923--the diagnosis was 'war neurasthenia'--and died in April of that year. In Surprised by Joy, Lewis describes how 'it had been my chance to spend fourteen days, and most of the fourteen nights as well, in close contact with a man who was going mad. And now I helped to hold him while he kicked and wallowed on the floor, screaming out that devils were tearing him and that he was that moment falling down into Hell' (p.163). He also mentions a former Irish parson at Oxford who though he had lost his faith was obsessed with the possibility of immortality. Sermons about hell, classically described by Joyce in respect of the Roman Catholic community, were also a staple of the Church of Ireland.

(43.) Sayer, p.136.

(44.) A.N. Wilson, p.53; but Maureen Moore is quoted by Sayer (p.136) as saying that her father was in County Wicklow at that time.

(45.) Sayer, p.155.

(46.) Sayer recounts Maureen Moore's conviction that she and her mother suffered an unnecessary delay in receiving confirmation of Paddy's death because his father, official recipient of the War Office communique, did not pass on the news to his estranged wife (p.132).

(47.) See Michael Ward, VII, An Anglo-American Literary Review, Vol. 14 (1997), 5-7.

(48.) The Lewis Papers, 6.123 as quoted in Wilson, p.67.

(49.) The Lewis Papers, 6.129 as quoted in Wilson, p.67.

(50.) Sayer, p.155. This was the case. Even with Lewis's support the menage moved home at least ten times between 1919 and 1923. (See Sayer, p.173).

(51.) Sayer, p.155.

(52.) Mrs Moore's contribution to 'The Kilns' came from the estate of her brother, Dr Askins. The Lewis brothers' contribution came from their father's estate. This had proved to be unexpectedly small. Between them, they had not enough money to secure the seclusion of the house. When the life interest of Jack and Warren Lewis expired on the death of Warren in 1973, the house and gardens went to Maureen.

(53.) It appears (particularly from Gresham's account) that Janie Moore demanded many domestic duties of Lewis but that he looked on her impositions as a 'school of virtue' (p.178). He was always grateful for the home-life she had given him, particularly as a returned war veteran.

(54.) The place of death was recorded as 37 Lower Leeson Street. According to Thorn's Directory, this property was set in flats at that time. This address was close by St Vincent's Private Hospital (now moved to Nutley Lane) and not far from the City of Dublin Hospital, Baggot Street (now closed).

(55.) A.N. Wilson is again correct, but unnecessarily imprecise, in writing that he 'died somewhere in Ireland' (p.225). Nearby No. 38 was for sale on this 'fashionable road at the end of a quiet settled cul de sac' at 3,000,000 [euro] in 2006.

(56.) A violinist and music teacher. On 27 August 1940 she married Leonard Blake, Director of Music at Worksop College in Derbyshire. From 1945, he held the same position at Malvern College, Worcestershire.

(57.) Quoted in Ward, p.7. The baronetcy passed to her son, the 9th baronet, Richard Francis (b. 8 January 1945), Lewis's godson, in 1997, thus returning it to the male line. The Irish connection with C. S. Lewis continues to this day in the residency of the sons (David in Dublin and Douglas in Carlow) of the American, Helen Joy Davidman, who married Lewis in 1956.

(58.) We can discount that Lewis, who while greatly admiring Calvin was not well disposed towards the Calvinism his preacher-followers had made of his theology, and so would not have been inclined to see Maureen's new status as a sign of election. For a discussion of this line of thinking see my 'The Protestant Ethic Thesis and its Critics', Social Studies (Maynooth, Winter, 1982-83), 67-91.

(59.) Elizabeth Anscombe was a disarming opponent for Lewis both because she was a woman and a Roman Catholic convert. Yet, she set about undermining the presupposition that had guided his then recent book on Miracles (1947). Lewis argued that naturalism is self-refuting in that it cannot accommodate either reason or conscience (this last because it is inextricably linked to determinism). In brief, Anscombe's riposte was that if naturalism is self-refuting, so too is supernaturalism, since it is a parasitic concept; its meaning comes from what we can alone experience empirically: the natural. As she later acknowledged, Anscombe was arguing a point, not stating her own position.

(60.) According to White, she accused Lewis of attending 'blood feasts' in participating in the Christian Eucharistic celebrations, p.147.

(61.) Lewis took regular holidays in Ireland, enjoyed the landscape, and kept up with a friend made in adolescence, Arthur Greeves, who lived in Belfast.

(62.) William Trevor, Excursions in the Real World: Memoirs (London: Penguin, 1995), p.xiii.

(63.) Reflections on the Psalms (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1958), p.45. This was a hope that inspired loathing in one of his Oxford colleagues. A letter written in 1951 by Hugh Trevor-Roper--later to be humiliated as authenticator for the Sunday Times of the spurious 'Hitler Diaries'--at a time when Lewis was seeking the Professorship of Poetry, runs (in part) as follows: 'Do you know C. S. Lewis? [...] a man who combines the face and figure of a hog-reeve or earth-stopper with the mind and thought of a Desert Father of the fifth century [...] a powerful mind warped by erudite philistinism, blackened by systematic bigotry [...] all the while distilling his morbid and illiberal thoughts into volumes of best-selling prurient religiosity' (Letters from Oxford, edited by Richard Davenport-Hines [London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson]), pp.285-6. This was just an extreme example of what was commonly thought to be Lewis's 'bad form' in making a point of articulating, even in the Common Room, his religious convictions. Lewis was never elected to an Oxford chair. In 1954, he was appointed to the Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge.