The headmaster of this school had already been prosecuted for cruelty to his students when Lewis arrived in 1908, and a few years later he would be certified insane. Both boys wrote again and again to their father, begging to come home, and Lewis prayed for relief from the constant savage beatings. But he did not escape “Belsen” until it was closed in 1910. As a result, he not only became estranged from God, but turned against his father, a pious, unpredictable lawyer of whom Lewis later wrote, “His emotions had always been uncontrolled. Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke wildly and acted unjustly.” Lewis’s next English school was only es, and was constantly bullied and teased. “Holidays are Heaven, school is, well, death,” he wrote.
According to his most recent biographer, Alan Jacobs, Lewis was rescued from adolescent depression and despair by the discovery of myth, romance, and fairy tale, and by intense Wordsworthian experience of the natural world, which he called “Joy.” At fifteen he read Frazer’s The Golden Bough and began to see Christianity as only another Near Eastern myth of a dying and reviving god. In December 1914 he was confirmed in a state of guilty disbelief.
For the next seventeen years, most of which Lewis spent at Oxford-first as a student and then as a tutor at Magdalen College, he regarded himself as an agnostic. It was not until September 1931, during a late-night discussion with two other Oxford scholars, Hugo Dyson and J.R.R. Tolkien, that he returned to Christianity. That night, as they talked in Lewis’s college rooms or strolled around Addison’s Walk, Tolkien and Dyson persuaded Lewis that the Christian myth was not only equally beautiful and powerful, but also true. Lewis’s conversion was completed nine days later on a trip to the zoo where he “made friends with a bear whom he nicknamed Bultitude.” As he reported later, “When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did.”
N. Wilson and Alan Jacobs believe that the relationship was sexual, and Wilson suggests that it had something of a sado-masochistic element
Though Lewis had a great deal to say about his spiritual history, he was secretive about his private life, a circumstance that has made things difficult for his biographers. 1 The central mystery is his thirty-two-year relationship with Mrs. Janie Moore, the mother of an army friend. Before they went overseas in 1917, Lewis and Patrick Moore agreed that if one of them were killed, the other would look after their single parents. (Lewis’s father was a widower; Mrs. Moore was estranged from her husband, though never divorced.) Patrick did die in France; his mother moved to Oxford, and link for over thirty years Lewis kept his word-and perhaps more than his word. Though he slept in his college rooms during the week, he spent most of his time at Mrs. Moore’s house, and went on extended holidays with her and her daughter, Maureen.
Lewis had been drawn to Tolkien, who was a practicing Catholic, because they both loved the myths and legends of Old English and Scandinavian folklore
Today biguous figure. Some of Lewis’s friends spoke of her as self-centered and completely unintellectual; others reported her as charming. Both A. Mrs. Moore spoke of Lewis as being “as good as an extra maid,” and many observers were amazed at the way he waited on her. He also largely supported her and her daughter financially for many years.