C.S. Lewis's Gay Best Friend, Arthur

"C.S. Lewis's Gay Best Friend, Arthur" Journal of Homosexuality

An Unmarked Grave in Belfast

There are a handful of significant cemeteries in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Flora Hamilton and Albert Lewis, the parents of C.S. Lewis, nineteen ninety-eight to nineteen sixty-three, the famed Oxford scholar and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, are buried in the Belfast City Cemetery, alongside other members of the Hamilton and Lewis families. When I first visited the cemetery, I found their grave surprisingly unkempt and covered in weeds, making it hard to find. Since my first visit, however, the premises have been tidied up rather nicely.

The parents of Lewis's oldest and most intimate friend, Arthur Greeves (1895-1966), are buried in the much smaller Dundonald Cemetery in East Belfast. According to public records, Arthur is buried with his parents in Section E, plot 67.2 Anyone who visits their grave, like me, will be confused: there are no markings for Arthur-neither on this plot nor adjacent ones where other members of the Greeves family, including some of Arthur's closest confidants, have been buried after his death. No engravings or plaque commemorate his life. Not even a name. I left the cemetery feeling perplexed and not a little sad. Later I confirmed with my local friend, the Director of the C.S. Lewis Institute in Belfast, that what I had seen-or not seen-was correct.

In this paper, I wish to explore the untold story of Arthur's sexual self-understanding. I had initially planned to run with the title "Six Moves in Arthur Greeves's Sexual Self-Understanding," but decided instead on the present title "C.S. Lewis's Gay Best Friend, Arthur" to highlight what most people do not know about at all. What readers must be thinking is: Was Arthur really ... Lewis's best friend? I will say something about that in a moment, although the word best will not be my main focus.

But first, a couple of thoughts on the other word in the title-Arthur. Except for readers and scholars of C.S. Lewis, the name Arthur Greeves will probably say nothing. He was indeed Lewis's oldest and most intimate friend. Lewis talks about him movingly in his partial autobiography Surprised by Joy, nineteen fifty-five. A few years older than Lewis, Arthur lived just across the road from Lewis's childhood home in Belfast. In his earliest letters Lewis calls Arthur "Galahad"-a playful reference to what the young Lewis, himself a committed atheist at the time, perceived as his friend's faith and sexual innocence. Galahad was "The Pure Knight" from Arthurian romance, including in Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, fourteen eighty-five, which Arthur and Lewis both read, and bonded over. Lewis would later playfully question both, Arthur's faith and his purity.

C.S. Lewis's Best Friend?

In his short book on their friendship, Kohm proposes that "it was Arthur Greeves-not Owen Barfield, not J.R.R. Tolkien, and not even Lewis's brother Warnie-who was C.S. Lewis's best friend." But is he correct?

Was it not Barfield who Lewis called his "wisest and best unofficial teacher," or Tolkien who Lewis called "a very great man" and "my very old friend"? Surely if Lewis even had a best friend it would have been his own brother, Warren, nineteen sixty-seven? And why are Charles Williams and George Sayer not even listed? After all, Lewis called Williams "my friend of friends," and Lewis's student-turnedfriend and early biographer Sayer has said, "We talked in the frankest way as friends should. I have never known a man more open about his private life."

Perhaps, however, Lewis did not have one best friend but several, at different stages of his life. In a letter to Arthur in nineteen thirty-five, Lewis wrote: "I am very fortunate in that respect to live near my friends, and you much less so. But even for me, it would make a great difference if you (and one or two others) lived in Oxford" (twenty-ninth December nineteen thirty-five).

I have come, however, to agree with Kohm. Lewis's brother Warnie is admittedly a close contender, but if the standards against which we evaluate intimate friendship-love are those Lewis outlines in The Four Loves, nineteen sixty, mutual appreciation, vulnerability, consistency (what Lewis calls "apprecitive love," "need-love," and "gift-love," respectively) and above all shared meaningful interests it is hard to top Arthur. He was there at the beginning, and he was there at the very end. Lewis loved many friends who shared his interests and passions, if not always his views, but Arthur surpasses them all, even Warnie, as the depository of his most intimate and vulnerable secrets. The level of honesty and transparency seems not to have been surpassed in any of his other friendships.

Almost three hundred letters from Lewis to Arthur have survived from a friendship that lasted nearly fifty years, nineteen fourteen to nineteen sixty-three, more than any other person he wrote to by a large margin. (In contrast, only four letters from Arthur to Lewis have been preserved.) Many of Lewis's letters to Arthur discuss sensitive topics-such as masturbation, sadomasochism, and their diverging sexual interests-so candidly that Arthur scribbled over many passages before donating them to Oxford University's Bodleian Library after his death in nineteen sixty-six. Almost all of his expurgations were later restored. Especially in a long, almost completely destroyed nineteen thirty letter to Arthur ending with the words "you are my only real Father Confessor," Lewis probably "unveils himself to Arthur with a transparency he showed to no other person."

Lewis says of Arthur that he "was the most faithful of friends, and carried the innumerable secrets of my own furtive and ignoble adolescence locked in a silence." "There are a great many subjects," he tells Arthur, "on which you are the only person whom I can write to or be written to by with full understanding" (twenty-ninth July nineteen thirty). Lewis talks to Arthur about his brother's secrets, such as his alcoholism, but never to his brother about Arthur's secrets. "Let me have your prayers; I am tired, scared, and bewildered" (fifteenth August nineteen fifty-four), he asks Arthur during one of Warnie's terrifying alcohol binges. Arthur was effectively another brother to Lewis, but one in whom he could confide about anything. After Arthur's death in nineteen sixty-six, Warnie wrote in his diary: "I do not suppose that with the exception of myself he Lewis ever had a more loved friend. Indeed I can hardly except myself" (first September nineteen sixty-six).

I will not press the case further here. It is not my main argument and ultimately not that important either. But it provides a helpful bridge to the questions that interest me in this paper: Was Arthur gay? How do we know, and what difference does it make? How did it affect their friendship? I do not intend to say anything very controversial: my approach will be historical and biographical, not ethical or theological. Lewis did have things to say about homosexuality from ethical, theological, anthropological, and legal perspectives as well, which I cannot go into in this paper. But as noted above, Arthur's sexual self-understanding developed-and possibly even oscillated-so we will certainly learn fascinating things about Arthur's views on homosexuality and about their friendship along the way.