Lewis’s marriage to Joy Gresham lasted four years, but before they met he had lived with another woman for over three decades. Lewis’s unconventional relationship with Janie “Minto” Moore is not the stuff that sentimental movies and other dreams are made of. In particular, Mrs. Moore presents Lewis’s most pious admirers with a dilemma. She was twenty years Lewis’s senior and had a teenage daughter named Maureen. She was married to another man, although permanently estranged from the husband she referred to only as “the Beast.” And she was an atheist, who derided the Masses that the Lewis brothers attended as “blood feasts.”
Lewis had befriended Janie Moore’s son, Patrick, in the army during World War I, and the two young men swore that should either of them fail to survive the war, the other would care for the parent of the deceased. Paddy Moore was killed in 1918, and Lewis proved as good as his word. He remained devoted to his friend’s mother, living with and helping to support her (although she did have a little money of her own) for the rest of her life, and Maureen until she married in 1940. Janie Moore, along with Warnie Lewis, was one of the three initial co-owners of the Kilns. When he began writing the Chronicles in the 1940s, Lewis had taken to calling her his “mother,” but most of his biographers concur that the relationship began as a romantic affair. (There is a tiny contingent who, for religious reasons, prefer to think that Lewis remained a virgin until he married, and an even tinier contingent who like to think he never consummated his love for Joy, whose divorce was not officially recognized by the Church of England.)
By 1943, when Lewis wrote to decline a speaking engagement at an American college, pleading the “difficulties” posed by a “very aged and daily more infirm mother,” his relationship to Minto had surely become platonic. His conversion to Christianity in 1931 would have made anything else unacceptable. But exactly what transpired between them during the thirty years they spent together remains a mystery, since Lewis refused to discuss it with anyone, except perhaps Arthur Greeves, and Arthur made a point of destroying letters he regarded as private. Lewis didn’t save copies himself and was an indifferent, impersonal diarist who gave up the practice entirely in 1927.
By default, Warren Lewis’s diaries and recollections are the source of much of the biographical material on his brother, and Warnie hated Minto. As a result, she doesn’t come off well in many accounts of Jack’s life, depending on how much credence a writer lends to Warnie’s versions of events. Some of Lewis’s biographers, A. N. Wilson in particular, have risen to her defense and insisted the relationship was not, as Warnie claimed, an unremitting trial. We can only guess at Lewis’s true feelings for Minto and how they evolved over time.
Janie Moore was an imperious woman, obsessed with the minor crises of the household and given to interrupting Lewis while he was at work, demanding that he run errands, make repairs, and take care of various chores on top of his duties as a university fellow and author. In one characteristic incident, described in Lewis’s short-lived diary, she asked him to try to exchange an antiquated iron wringer in downtown Oxford, then after he had hauled the unwanted device all the way back home to Headington, sent him out again to inquire after the purse she thought she’d left at the Oxford bus station — all while he was supposed to be working. He started on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe when Minto was in her late seventies and by then she had deteriorated badly. She was bedridden and forgetful, insisting that her incontinent dog (whose health had become her obsession) be walked as many as a dozen times a day. Warnie’s occasional alcoholic binges made matters worse; during the year Lewis wrote the first Chronicle, he informed a friend that “dog stools and human vomit have made my day to day.”
Warnie had liked Mrs. Moore well enough when he first moved in with them in 1932, but he came to see her as a kind of vampire, sapping his brother’s time, health, and dignity; he claimed to have once overheard her telling someone that Jack was “as good as an extra maid in the house.” The peculiarities of her personality only intensified as she grew old, sick, and cranky. While Lewis was working on the first draft of The Magician’s Nephew (later put aside for Prince Caspian), he collapsed with a streptococcus infection that his doctor attributed to exhaustion. Warnie’s diary describes leaving his brother’s hospital room in a fury and arriving at the Kilns, where, he wrote in his diary, he “let her ladyship have a blunt statement of the facts” and demanded that Minto permit Jack a vacation. On the day she died in 1951, Warnie devoted several pages of his diary to reviling her, describing her relationship with his brother as “the rape of J’s life … I wonder how much of his time she did waste?”
Even if Warnie was exaggerating, why did Lewis — the man who had written, in Surprised by Joy, “always and at all ages (where I dared) I hotly demanded not to be interrupted” — submit to such tyranny? He seems to have acquired in Janie Moore both that feminine preoccupation with trivialities he so disliked and his father’s aggravating intrusiveness. For someone who claimed to dread “the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective,” he set himself up in a situation where his own cherished autonomy was constantly overthrown by the needs of the household and its mistress. Perhaps there were compensations that Warnie didn’t appreciate. Lewis’s more recent biographers (those whom the affable Warnie, who survived his brother by ten years, never got the opportunity to charm) tend to think so. Especially in the early years, the relationship offered Jack, as Alan Jacobs puts it, “a depth of affection and tenderness on both sides from which Warnie was excluded and to which he was blind.”
Wilson believes that Lewis’s loyalty to Minto was cemented in his early twenties, after he was wounded in the war and hospitalized in England. Lewis’s father, who had a neurotic phobia about traveling or otherwise disrupting his routine, never came from Ireland to visit his son. This compounded the hurt Jack had felt when Albert hadn’t tried to see him before he was sent to the front; it was a time when everyone knew that many of the young men being sent there wouldn’t come back. Janie Moore, by contrast, had comforted Lewis on the eve of his deployment and nursed him after his return. Their relationship, then, began in genuine love and a maternal nurturance that the motherless Lewis no doubt found especially sweet.
Somehow, the important relationships in Lewis’s life had a tendency to resolve into obligations felt toward needy, importunate people. Take his brother: Warnie believed that his own best years were spent in the “Little End Room” of their boyhood home in Belfast, where the two brothers invented stories for their shared imaginary world. Warnie often talked of his desire to re-create that idyll with Jack and to live in it till the end of their days. When Albert died, in 1931, and the brothers had to empty and sell the Belfast house, Warnie was so upset at the prospect of other children playing with their old toys that the chest containing them had to be buried, unopened, in the backyard. Warnie could be jealous of Jack’s time and affection. Just before he came to live with them, Jack felt the need to write to his thirty-five-year-old brother, delicately explaining that the relationships he’d acquired as a grown man would always prevent a completely faithful reproduction of the Little End Room in Oxford.