Tea at Trianon: C.S. Lewis and Janie King Moore

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

C.S. Lewis and Janie King Moore

A strange story but it explains a lot, especially about Edmund and the White Witch. From First Things:

Lewis first met Janie King Moore as a very young man training for war, together with her son, Paddy. The two future soldiers promised they would look after one another’s single parents if one of them died in combat. Young Lewis was drawn to Mrs. Moore, a spirited and maternal Irishwoman who was separated from her husband. When Paddy died, Lewis didn’t just look after his friend’s mother. He began keeping house with her.

This is generally understood to be the “huge and complex episode” on which Lewis refuses to elaborate in his memoir Surprised by Joy. For decades, biographers were split over the precise nature of this peculiar relationship. A. N. Wilson believed young Lewis’s letters held enough subtle clues to put the burden of proof on scholars who thought the living arrangement wasn’t sexual. It was only after the recent death of Lewis’s secretary Walter Hooper that conclusive evidence emerged, as confirmed by Lewis’s lawyer and fellow Inkling Owen Barfield. In Hooper’s words, “Owen Barfield told me that yes, Lewis told him there had been a sexual relationship and it began really at the time, right after he came out of the army.”

This revelation shouldn’t have shocked attentive Lewis readers, whose letters hardly paint his younger self as a paragon of sexual morality. Further, his early contempt for “religion” would have been something he shared with Mrs. Moore, who was at best indifferent, at worst hostile to Christianity. It’s not difficult to imagine how these two lost souls might have formed a co-dependent entanglement—the woman without a man in her life, the man without a woman.

But young Lewis would eventually find himself most reluctantly on his knees, becoming a theist, in his rooms at Magdalen College. By Alister McGrath’s calculations, it was in that same year that Lewis and Mrs. Moore moved into the famous Kilns. There was a connecting door between their bedrooms, the only way Lewis could access the rest of the house without climbing out his window. Nevertheless, he chose to build a fire escape and bolt the connecting door shut. It would remain closed until Mrs. Moore’s death.

As far as we know, Mrs. Moore never relinquished her ingrained anti-Christian prejudice. As her affection for Lewis curdled into all-demanding possessiveness, she became a steady drain on his time and energy. We glimpse something of what he quietly endured from his collected correspondence with close friends and confidants. He always writes with characteristic warmth and matter-of-factness, never complaining, only asking for prayer. Sometimes he tells them the house is doing well, and sometimes he frankly confesses that things are “pretty bad.” For better or worse, this is the shape of his life. His prayer requests for Mrs. Moore are especially tender, touched with sadness. “Pray for Jane,” he writes to his long-time correspondent Sister Penelope. “She is the old lady I call my mother and live with . . . an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in several other senses. And I can do so little for her. (Read more.)