by haferguson » March 24th, 2006, 7:06 pm
To return for a bit to the subject of CSL's relationship with Janie Moore:
What surprises me is that everyone immediately thinks of a sexual relationship as the only possible emotional complication.
From my reading of practically everything that Lewis wrote, plus Sayer's biography, I think that Lewis had quite violent 'surrogate mother' feelings towards her. She was a woman with a soft spot for everything and everyone in need, from stray cats to poor acquaintances. She always called him and his brother 'the boys'. She filled the painful gap that Albert Lewis left, who did not visit Jack before he went to war in France, nor while he was in hospital after being wounded. Making all allowance for a man who would have had to cross the Irish Sea and who hated the disruption of his routine, this remains inadequate behaviour for a father.
For the rest of his life, also after he became a Christian, Jack called her his mother, not always explaining that she wasn't really. That is how he saw her, and when the violence of his first feelings had died down, that is [I think] what remained.
haferguson