But it is the classical roots of communication and rhetoric that Lewis would come to know best. During his pre-Oxford education Lewis wrote to his father, “In Greek we have begun Demosthenes. Of course oratory is not a sort of literature that I appreciate or understand in any language, so that I am hardly qualified to express an opinion on our friend with the mouthful of pebbles.”68 Even though Lewis had pronounced Demosthenes as one of the two “great bores” he also noted, “However, compared with Cicero, he strikes me as a man with something to say, intent only upon saying it clearly and shortly.”69 Lewis became well versed in the classical approaches to words and meaning. Lewis scholar Bruce Edwards concludes, “Lewis understood ‘rhetoric’ in its traditional classical and medieval sense—a compendium of verbal tools that assisted and equipped an artist or essayist with strategies to communicate truth more memorably, and, ultimately, to express difficult ideas more accessibly …”70 Edwards adds that through Lewis’s study of rhetoric he was able “… to appeal to the imagination with greater aplomb and delight.”71
As Lewis charted his educational course, especially attracted to the study of ideas, language, and literature, his academic experiences were abruptly interrupted by experiences that, although rarely explicitly discussed, were not far from the surface of his writing and thinking—World War I.
Lewis seldom talked about or wrote about his war experience with anyone. He did describe some of his army experiences in his chapter “Guns and Good Company,” in Surprised by Joy, but he did not make explicit links between his war experiences and the ideas that would illuminate his speaking and writing.72 A case could be made that his military experience was not a major factor shaping his professional life. Yet in his book A Morning After War: C. S. Lewis and WWI, K. J. Gilchrist argues that although Lewis made little direct or even indirect reference to his brief war experience (he was in combat for less than three months), his war experience had a profound effect on him and his writing.73 Gilchrist noted, “C. S. Lewis once explained that communication requires a listener not only to hear a message and understand what has been said but also requires the listener to understand what has not been said.”74 Gilchrist concludes, “Understanding what has not been said has been much of the difficulty in understanding Lewis’s service in the First World War.”75
←47 | 48→
Given Lewis’s disdain for subjectivism, he would likely refute Gilchrist by cautioning him to avoid “reading between the lines.”76 In commenting about the interpretation of scripture, Lewis noted, “These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seeds and can’t see an elephant ten yards away in broad daylight.”77 Lewis scholar Jerry Root notes, “It was this … practice of reading between the lines that led Lewis to question some of the work done by the higher critics of Scripture.”78
Even if one heeds Lewis’s caution about “reading between the lines,” serving in the trenches in World War I was undoubtedly an indelible experience that gave Lewis seminal insights about war, death, pain, suffering, and loss—topics of Lewis’s books, essays, and stories. As Gilchrist cogently describes, “As an adult, he was first a soldier; as a writer, first a war poet; as an adherent to reasoned beliefs, first an atheist.”79 Here again, however, Lewis might caution against “The Personal Heresy” by suggesting that we look at what he actually wrote rather than trying to “read between the lines” to identify and attribute meaning to pieces of his past when interpreting his work.
When Lewis arrived in Oxford to start his studies at University College he volunteered to train with the university Officers’ Training Corps (OTC). Owing his education to England could have been one motivation for patriotically deciding to enlist in the Army. The purpose of the OTC, according to the Oxford University Handbook, was to “give an opportunity to undergraduates to offer their services to the Country in the simplest and most practical way during peace, and to provide officers for His Majesty’s Army (Regular and Territorial) from this University in time of national emergency.”80 Lewis spent only a few weeks in his rooms at University College before he was shuttled off to a dreary room in Keble College to fulfill his OTC commitments. (With its angular exterior brick façade, Keble College remains one of the most architecturally distinctive of Oxford’s 39 colleges.) With the war at full tilt, officers were needed, and Lewis’s past and present educational experience made an OTC member a prime candidate for leadership.
Although he did not directly discuss his war experiences in his writing, his military and battlefield encounters were perhaps his inspiration for discussing pain and the nature of hell in The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and other essays and poems. Lewis’s first book, Spirits in Bondage, published under the pseudonym Clive Hamilton in 1919—the year he returned to Oxford—includes allusions to dark and troublesome events in WWI.81 Although his war experiences ←48 | 49→cast shadows over his early 20s, it was his connection with one soldier who was to become his friend, which had an influence on him for the rest of his life.
Mrs. Moore and Lewis’s Audience
Lewis first mentions his friend “Paddy” Moore (Edward Francis Courtenay Moore, 1898–1918) when they were both training for military service. In a letter to Arthur Greeves Lewis describes Paddy as a “good fellow.”82 They undoubtedly became good friends because of their common Irish ancestry. Jack and Paddy made their pact that if either of them should be killed in the war, the survivor would care for the deceased’s parent. In Lewis’s case, his father Albert Lewis, and in Paddy’s case, mother Janie King Askins Moore.
Lewis saw Mrs. Moore frequently because she had come to Oxford to be near Paddy. She was estranged from her husband and although never divorced, remained separated from him for the rest of their lives. George Sayer, a former student who became a trusted Lewis friend, reached the conclusion that Lewis was “infatuated” with Mrs. Moore.83 She was perhaps the nurturing mother that Lewis had lost when he was nine. Lewis had a month’s leave before being sent into active service. Rather than going home to visit his father, Lewis spent his time in Bristol with Paddy and Mrs. Moore. Missing letters (Sayer suggests they were destroyed) between Lewis and his close confidant and perhaps confessor, Greeves, may have shed light on the Moore-Lewis relationship. But Sayer concludes, “The letters that are left make it quite clear that he loved Mrs. Moore.”84 Despite their 25-year age difference, there seemed to be a deep and enduring emotional bond between them.
Paddy was killed in battle in 1918. Lewis had been wounded by shrapnel in the Battle of Arras at Mount Bernenchon (which, in reality, is a flat plain rather than a mountain),85 shrapnel that killed the Sergeant standing next to him. He was sent to a hospital and eventually returned to