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In March of 1949, C. S. Lewis invited a friend named Roger Lancelyn Green to dinner at Magdalen College of Oxford University, where Lewis was a tutor. Green had attended Lewis's lectures a decade earlier, and their friendship had grown over the years. It must have been especially refreshing for Lewis to contemplate an evening of food, wine, and conversation, for his life was miserable at that moment.

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis by Alan Jacobs HarperSanFrancisco

He lived with his brother and an elderly woman named Mrs. Moore, whom he often referred to as his mother—though she was not. Both of them were unwell and dependent upon him. Just a few days before his dinner with Green, Lewis had written to an American friend that he was "tied to an invalid," which is what Mrs. Moore had become, confined to bed by arthritis and varicose veins. For her part, Mrs. Moore proclaimed that Lewis was "as good as an extra maid in the house," and she certainly used him as a maid. She seems also to have become obsessive and quarrelsome in her latter years, worried always about her dog and constantly at odds with the domestic help.

Lewis hired two maids to help with cleaning and nursing when he had to be at Magdalen, where he maintained a grueling schedule of lectures, tutorials, and correspondence. But for a time, one of the maids became mentally unstable, and he occasionally had to return home to sort out conflicts the women had with each other and with Mrs. Moore. In 1947, he had been asked by the Marquess of Salisbury to participate in meetings, along with the archbishops of Canterbury and York, to discuss the future of the Church of England (of which Lewis was a member). He had declined: "My mother is old and infirm … and I never know when I can, even for a day, get away from my duties as a nurse and a domestic servant. (There are psychological as well as material difficulties in my house.)"

In the intervening two years, the miseries had if anything intensified. There are dark hints in some of his writings that the suffering shook Lewis's Christian faith to the core. Though he had written of the joys of heaven, in the year of the Marquess's letter, he found himself consumed by a "horror of nonentity, of annihilation"—that is, of finding that the God in whom he had trusted had no eternal life to offer.

Lewis was a famous man who would in a few months find himself on the cover of Time magazine and who was besieged by a blizzard of daily letters. He was determined to answer every correspondent, and his brother Warnie normally assisted him, primarily by typing dictated or drafted letters and keeping the files organized. But at the beginning of March 1949, Warnie was in Oxford's Acland Hospital, having drunk himself into insensibility. After his release, Warnie wrote in his diary that his brother's "kindness remains unabated," but C. S. Lewis's resources were failing. In early April, he wrote to a friend who had reproached him for not replying promptly to a letter, "Dog's stools and human vomit have made my day today: one of those days when you feel at 11 a.m. that it really must be 3 p.m." Two months later, he collapsed at his home and had to be taken to the hospital. He was diagnosed with strep throat, but his deeper complaint was simply exhaustion.

Such was C. S. Lewis's world the evening he had Roger Lancelyn Green to dinner. It's unlikely that Green had any idea how miserable his friend had been. Lewis was a charming host, and, as Green wrote in his diary, they had "wonderful talk until midnight: He read me two chapters of a book for children he is writing—very good, indeed, though a trifle self-conscious." The book would become The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first story about a world called Narnia.

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December 2005, Vol. 49, No. 12