Jack was particularly struck with the intelligent questions Joy asked and the way that she doggedly pursued her own writing career. Joy had a master of arts degree from Columbia University and had won a prize in poetry writing, and at the time she was writing a book on the Ten Commandments. While Jack enjoyed his lively correspondence with her, he was still surprised when she wrote to say that she was leaving the United States and coming to England for an extended visit. She asked if she could meet Jack, and he set up a luncheon date for them to get together at Magdalen College.
Before Joy arrived in Oxford, though, Jack enjoyed a wonderful holiday visiting ruined castles in North Wales. Roger Green accompanied Jack on the trip, and the two of them hatched a plan to spice up their vacation. They booked their rooms separately at the Bulkeley Arms at Beaumaris on Anglesey. They arrived at the inn separately and checked into their rooms, keeping up the pretense that the one man did not know the other. Later, in the dining room, they both put on quite a show, pretending to meet by chance and striking up a conversation.
The following day Jack and Roger visited the ruins of a nearby castle, and Jack was greatly impressed by them. As the two men sat atop the castle’s old tower, they began hatching the plot of a story together. They pretended that they were the only survivors of a worldwide cataclysm and then later discovered a group of children who had also survived. Together they all decide to found a new civilization.
As they hatched their plot, Jack and Roger paid close attention to what important facts of religion, literature, history, science, and general knowledge they could call to mind to be handed on to the children who would be the founders and keepers of the new civilization. It was a creative and intellectual exercise that seemed to stimulate both men, who were still devising what knowledge they would pass on when they visited Conway Castle the next day.
Jack arrived back in Oxford feeling refreshed and invigorated from his vacation with Roger. On his return he found two interesting pieces of mail waiting for him at home. One was a brand-new copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the third book in The Chronicles of Narnia series. The other was a letter from Joy Gresham. Joy had arrived in London and was looking forward to meeting Jack soon. Jack grew nervous as he prepared to meet this woman with whom he had shared a personal correspondence for two years.
Finally the day of their meeting arrived. Joy took a train from London to Oxford, where she had booked into the Eastgate Hotel, directly across the road from Magdalen College, where Jack and Warren met her for lunch. Joy was an attractive woman of medium height, with dark hair and sharp features. She was vivacious and every bit the brash, intellectual American woman that Jack had imagined her to be. She peppered the stories she told with slang and seemed to have no idea what was a proper “English” line of conversation in a mixed group. Warren and others were taken aback by her manner of speaking, but Jack found it refreshing and direct. He spent much of their lunch laughing at the shocking observations she made about English culture.
When Joy returned to London, Jack found himself missing her, and so he invited her to The Kilns for Christmas. It was supposed to be a short visit, but she ended up staying for two weeks. During this time the two of them took long walks in the country and visited some of Jack’s favorite places. Jack read the manuscript Joy was working on and offered some advice for strengthening it, and Joy, in turn, read some of Jack’s unpublished writing.
During this time together over Christmas, Joy confided in Jack the full extent of her marital problems. Her husband, Bill Gresham, was a well-known novelist in the United States. In fact, his first novel, Nightmare Alley, had been turned into a movie in 1947, netting him the sum of sixty thousand dollars. However, he had gone through the money on alcohol, bad living, and ensuing tax problems. Fortunately, Joy’s cousin Renée Pierce had agreed to come from Florida to New York to stay with Bill and look after their two boys while Joy traveled to England.
On her final day at The Kilns, Joy received a letter from her husband. As she read it she became distraught. “Renée and I are in love and have been since the middle of August,” Bill Gresham wrote. Then he asked for a divorce, outlining the long-term arrangement he preferred. Joy could get remarried “to some really swell guy, Renée and I to be married, both families to live in easy calling distance so that the Gresham kids could have a Mommy and Daddy on hand.”
Joy went straight to Jack with the letter and poured out her heart to him. Jack was shocked that any man, especially a man who had called himself a Christian, could be that callous and calculating. Joy indicated that she would do her best to try to fix the situation when she got back home to the United States.
By the summer of 1953, it was obvious that Joy’s marriage was over. In the divorce settlement Joy received custody of her two sons and monetary support from Bill, though she seriously doubted that she would see much of that. Bill was now free to marry Joy’s cousin Renée, but Joy had no intention of completing the cozy living arrangement by moving a block or two away. Instead, she sold her belongings and set sail for England, this time with her two young sons, David and Douglas, in tow. She found a hotel in Belsize Park, London, in which to stay and immediately enrolled the boys at an expensive private school, Dane Court, in Surrey.
When Jack learned of Joy’s return to England, he took financial responsibility for her sons’ education, just as he had done for Maureen when he met Mrs. Moore. The money for their education was to be paid through the charity Jack had set up, using income from the royalties on his books.
Jack saw little of Joy after her return to England, since he was not interested in traveling to London and she was busy writing. But he did invite her and the boys to The Kilns for four days in December. Jack found David Gresham to be a little withdrawn and sullen, while his younger brother Douglas seemed to be a much happier, more adaptable boy.
When seven-year-old Douglas laid eyes on the large wardrobe parked in the corner of the hallway at The Kilns, he asked, “Is that the wardrobe?”
“It might be!” Jack replied.
Douglas was entranced by the magic wardrobe he had read about in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but he also kept his distance from it, not yet ready to open it and step inside for fear of where it might transport him.
Of the visit, Jack wrote in a letter, “Last week we entertained a lady from New York for four days, with her boys aged nine and seven respectively…. It however went swimmingly, though it was very, very exhausting. The energy of the modern American boy is astonishing; this pair thought nothing of a four mile hike across broken country as an incident in a day of ceaseless activity, and when we took them up Magdalen tower, they said as soon as we got back to ground, ‘Let’s do it again.’”
Before David and Douglas Gresham left The Kilns with their mother to return to London, Jack gave them each a typewritten copy of The Horse and His Boy and told them that he was going to dedicate the published version of the book to them.
Jack and Joy saw a little more of each other after the December visit, but both of them were also very busy in their own spheres. Joy had been spurred on to finish writing Smoke on the Mountain, her book on the Ten Commandments, by Jack’s willingness to write a foreword for it. The fact that it would have the name C. S. Lewis on the cover made the book a much easier pitch to a publisher, and Joy intended to take full advantage of the offer. Meanwhile, Jack was exploring a new career possibility.
The idea of leaving a college where you had lectured for twenty-nine years would have been a wrenching experience for most people, but for Jack it was particularly painful, since he hated any kind of change. But the opportunity had come out of the blue, and Jack felt he had to investigate it. In 1954, Magdalene College in Cambridge established a new professorship, or “Chair,” concentrating on medieval and Renaissance literature. Many of Jack’s colleagues and friends urged him to apply for the position, but Jack felt stuck. According to the terms that Jack and Warren had agreed to when they bought The Kilns, the place did not belong to either of them. Instead, the brothers got to live there for as long as they wanted, but when they died—or left—The Kilns became the property of Maureen Moore.
Jack did not think he could afford to buy a new place in which to live in Cambridge, nor did he think that Warren would be happy with such a change. His only glimmer of hope that Warren might be all right without him was the fact that Warren was having some modest success in his own writing career. Warren had always been fascinated with French history and had been writing a book titled The Splendid Century: Some Aspects of French Life in the Reign of Louis XIV. He had just completed the book and found a publisher for it, and now he was eager to begin a sequel titled The Sunset of the Splendid Century: The Life and Times of Louis Auguste de Bourbon, Duc de Maine, 1670–1736.
Yet, as he weighed his options, Jack realized that he had burned many bridges at Magdalen College, Oxford, and as a result he would never get a promotion there. Much of the problem revolved around his prominent position as a Christian writer. Many of his colleagues felt that he had “lowered the tone” of the English department at Magdalen College by writing for common people and then, even more scandalously, for children. This, along with Jack’s weariness at tutoring an endless stream of undergraduates, had made him the target of many veiled complaints.
Eventually Jack decided that he was better suited to the professorship at Cambridge, though he loathed the idea of moving all his books there, making new friends, and adjusting to a new set of college politics. Thankfully, though, the decision to make the transition was made easier for him when his Cambridge supporters suggested that he continue to live at The Kilns at Oxford and spend term days from Monday afternoon to Friday afternoon at Cambridge. Jack felt that he could live with this arrangement, and he put in his resignation at Magdalen College, Oxford, and accepted the new post at Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Jack’s inauguration in his new position as professor came before he officially moved into his new rooms at the college. It was one of the most memorable inaugurations of Jack’s life. The event occurred on November 29, 1954, Jack’s fifty-sixth birthday. When he arrived at the hall to give his inauguration speech, the place was completely packed. There were so many people, in fact, that the group of friends, colleagues, and old students from Oxford who had traveled to Cambridge for the event could find nowhere to sit. Eventually they were accommodated on the stage behind Jack.
Once the introduction and other formalities were dispensed with, Jack pulled his gown around him and stood to address the gathered crowd. The subject of his lecture was his assertion that a great divide in culture had taken place between the time of Jane Austen and the present day. In a spirited delivery Jack gave examples of how changes in politics, art, religion, and, in particular, modern technology had altered man’s place in nature. As a result mankind had embraced a new myth—that the new is better. Jack pointed out that he was not a part of this new order. He was a “dinosaur”—a part of the old order. He then encouraged his listeners to draw on the combined knowledge of men like him so that they could broaden their cultural understanding by embracing the old order.
Once Jack had spoken, the audience erupted into applause, and such comments as “We were overwhelmed by his vitality and enthusiasm” and “I have never heard a lecture anywhere near as exciting” were heard around the hall. For weeks afterward it was not uncommon to hear students at Cambridge referring to themselves as “dinos.”
