Nothing remains of the poem about Helen, but Lewis may have drawn something from his recollections of it near the end of his life when he began his unfinished romance ‘After Ten Years’ about her adventures as a worn and middle-aged woman after the fall of Troy. As for Simon Magus’s ‘Dynasties’, they surely contributed something to the Oyéresu and the Eldila (both good and bad) in Out of the Silent Planet and its sequels.
In spite of continuing with his ambition to become a poet, Lewis submitted no poems to the various undergraduate periodicals and volumes of Oxford poetry of his day. Oxford after the First World War (as after the Second) produced a generation of undergraduates with unusually high artistic gifts. ‘As nearly everyone here is a poet himself, they have naturally no time left for lionizing others,’ he wrote to his father on 25 May 1919. ‘Indeed, the current literary set is one I could not afford to live in anyway, and though many of them have kindly bought copies of the book,* their tastes run rather to modernism, vers libre, and that sort of thing. I have a holy terror of coteries …’52
Yet in spite of this professed dislike for coteries, Lewis was trying to form something of the sort at the time of this letter, with two of his Univ. friends, Cyril Hartmann and Rodney Pasley. ‘I don’t think anything, even an undergraduate clique, can live on denials,’ he was writing to Hartmann from Little Lea on 25 July; and later in the correspondence,
It is no use to attack ‘The Swiss Family Sitwell’ unless we offer something in its place – not perhaps actual work – for we are likely to do that in any case – but at least some new and definite formula. Is it possible to find some common ground, other than mere dislike of eccentricity on which to meet? … I agree that we should not form ourselves into a definite society. Above all we must not take ourselves too seriously … Could people not circulate their things in manuscript and then face an informal meeting in which the others would discuss the victim, who of course could defend himself?53
The correspondence continued at some length throughout the Long Vacation of 1919, but little came of it, though Lewis’s involvement in the movement is of interest: it shows an early aversion to ‘modernism’ in literature that he never fully overcame, as well as indicating that his thoughts were already turning towards the formation of the kind of unofficial literary group that found fruition years later in the Inklings.
And indeed Lewis very soon lost contact with the literary movements of the younger members of the university. He was able to give little time to poetry or social activities until the summer of 1920, since he was reading hard for Honour Mods during the three previous terms – and he was able to report to his father on 4 April that ‘I did get a First after all’, which served as sugar to the black draught of a holiday in Somerset ‘with a man who has been asking me for some time to go and “walk” with him’54 and which would keep him from visiting Little Lea that vacation. Jack was really on holiday in Somerset with Mrs Moore and Maureen.
During the summer of 1920 Mrs Moore and her daughter Maureen moved permanently to Oxford, renting various flats in Headington towards the cost of which Lewis contributed. He continued to live in college during term until the following June, when, after the custom of normal undergraduates, he moved out into lodgings – but in his case it was into what was largely his own rented house, shared with the Moores; they had returned to 28 Warneford Road, Headington. Lewis described his ‘usual life’ to Greeves after the move in a letter of June 1921:
I walk and ride out into the country, sometimes with the family, sometimes alone. I work; I wash up and water the peas and beans in our little garden; I try to write; I meet my friends and go to lectures. In other words I combine the life of an Oxford undergraduate with that of a country householder, a feat which I imagine is seldom performed. Such energies as I have left for general reading go almost entirely on poetry – and little enough of that.55
In fact, as Warnie Lewis subsequently wrote,
What had actually happened was that Jack had set up a joint establishment with Mrs Moore, an arrangement which bound him to her service for the next thirty years and ended only with her death in January 1951. How the arrangement came into being no one will ever know, for it was perhaps the only subject which Jack never mentioned to me; more than never mentioned, for on the only occasion when I hinted at my curiosity he silenced me with an abruptness which was sufficient warning never to re-open the topic.56
There were many drawbacks to this curious state of bondage to which Lewis had voluntarily submitted himself. To begin with, it made him miserably poor at a time when his academic and creative life seemed to demand complete freedom from financial worries. He had an adequate allowance for a bachelor undergraduate living in college or lodgings, but not for a householder with a ‘mother’ and adopted sister largely dependent on him. And he could not, of course, ask his father to increase his allowance as the whole ‘set-up’ with the Moores was kept a secret from him.
While Lewis clearly enjoyed the family life Mrs Moore made possible, even his own diary suggests that she was highly possessive and selfish – or thoughtless – to an astonishing degree. Lewis was expected to help with the housework and run errands for her, even when they were able to employ two resident maids, a daily and a handyman-gardener. ‘I came to live with him after my retirement from the Army in 1932,’ wrote Warnie Lewis, ‘and in the vacation we shared a workroom. I do not think I ever saw Jack at his desk for more than half an hour without Mrs Moore calling for him. “Coming!” Jack would roar, down would go his pen, and he would be away perhaps five minutes, perhaps half an hour; and then return and calmly resume work on a half-finished sentence.’57
Owen Barfield met Lewis in 1919 and after being introduced to Mrs Moore in 1922 he was a frequent visitor to their home. Over the years he and his wife came to know Mrs Moore well, and in a Foreword he wrote for All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis 1922–1927 (1991), he attempted to balance Warnie’s account of her. ‘I find it strange to recall,’ he said,
that during those early years I was given no hint at all of that household background. He was simply a fellow undergraduate and later a literary and philosophical friend. I remember him telling me on one occasion that he had to get back in order to clear out the oven in the gas cooker, and I took it to be something that would happen once in a blue moon. It is only from the Diary that I have learnt what a substantial part of his time and energy was being consumed in helping to run Mrs Moore’s household, and also how much of that was due to the shadow of sheer poverty that remained hanging over them both until at last he obtained his fellowship … One of the things that make me welcome its appearance in print is, that it will do much to rectify the false picture that has been painted of her as a kind of baneful stepmother and inexorable taskmistress. It is a picture that first appeared as early as 1966 in the introductory Memoir to W.H. Lewis’s Letters of C.S. Lewis, and it has frequently reappeared in the prolific literature on C.S. Lewis which has since been published here and there. If she imposed some burdens on him, she saved him from others by taking them on herself even against his protestations. Moreover she was deeply concerned to further his career.58
The most immediate result of Lewis’s double life when he moved out