The Pub

The Relics of St. Clive

Brittaini Maul

Notions of pilgrimage and sainthood have a tendency to seem antiquated. The idea of traveling a vast distance to see the bones of a particular saint feels naïve, foreign and often laughable. When people refer to modern figures as saints, they rarely mean it. Here at Wheaton College, home of the Narnian wardrobe, we jokingly refer to C.S. Lewis as our patron saint. But a summer visit to The Kilns, Lewis’s house in Oxford, reveals that such a title might be less of a joke and more of a reality.

The restoration process of The Kilns began in 1993. The C.S. Lewis Foundation, a group of Christian and, from what I could gather, American scholars and enthusiasts purchased the home. They obtained a series of photographs, taken by post-Lewis owners before beginning a modernization process. For eight years, over two hundred people traversed the Atlantic, supplying their own transportation and board costs, to work on the renovation. The Foundation called their program for this “Vacations with a Purpose.” The addition of the phrase “with a purpose” is a jarring rhetorical choice. It contains echoes of short term missions’ statements that convince eager church goers to leave their creature comforts behind and work on brief projects for those less fortunate. But these weekends and extended stays “with a purpose” were not spent in the service of the living. Rather than teaching VBS to orphans in Guatemala or spooning out rice in African refugee camps, these volunteers donated their vacations to the renovation of a dead man’s house.

A tour of the grounds begins in the garden and moves through the hallway into the common room. The common room our tour guide showed us was restored, which is an interesting way of saying: “made even better than it was.” To make things more authentic, they had added back in the heavy wool curtains used during WWII bombings and positioned a ration book on Lewis’s desk. The walls of the room were a pretty, eggshell white, but the ceiling above the crown molding was a discolored yellow. Lewis and his friends liked to smoke in their common room, as did most of the British in the 1940s and 50s, and as a result the walls were covered in a thick residue from years of constant pipe smoking. It was streaked, unbecoming, and disgusting. So, rather than keep a constant influx of smokers, the society decided to pretty up the room but leave the ceiling as a talking point. When you enter the common room, you are entering a common room that is close to what Lewis would have used, but really it is even better. It has been perfected.

Additionally, there are pictures of Lewis everywhere. Most people display pictures of themselves in their home, but usually they have more than one person in them or are taken at obscure travel locations. The pictures of Lewis lining the walls of the Kilns were a mixture of childhood photos, publicity photos, and pictures from Lewis’s collection. The individual pictures of Lewis as a boy were not out of place, because even an ordinary person might have the odd baby picture up. And the pictures from the personal collection, like the one of Lewis and Joy sitting on the front lawn, are completely normal. It is the publicity photos- the ones that appear on book jackets and Wikipedia articles- that are unnerving. If Lewis himself put them up, it makes him look incredibly narcissistic. If the Lewis Society put them up, they in some way have become like a doting parent – like a mother who frames her son’s school picture from picture day and adds it to the family wall. And if the pictures of Lewis lining the walls are not authentic and were not there when Lewis occupied the house, then putting them there changes The Kilns from a restored house where C.S. Lewis lived to the C.S. Lewis Shrine, a place of relics that maybe are not holy and that probably do not have miracle powers, but are nonetheless special. At least, more special than those relics of ordinary people.

No aspect of Lewis’s life is safe from this restoration process; it extends past the physical remnants of his house to Lewis’s character. The guides at The Kilns take their jobs very seriously, dedicating long hours and conversations to the unearthing of Lewis material. One of the tour guides describes every single anecdote or story about Lewis and Joy as “delightful” or “wonderful.” A talk from the chaplain of Magdelen College provided a stark contrast to such attentive glorification of the person of Lewis. According to the chaplain, C.S. Lewis was not well liked outside of his small group of friends. Even some of those relationships soured later in Lewis’s life. So, not only was the place where Lewis lived restored to a better condition than it actually existed in when he lived there, but Lewis’s personality  has been redefined into something “delightful” and “wonderful” when in fact it probably was not – at least not to a majority of Lewis’s colleagues.

Many of the saints, similarly, probably were not the immaculate figures their pilgrims thought they were. Becket, for example, was probably cranky in the morning, or had bad breath, or held anti-Semetic positions, or something. He was flawed. Yet after his assassination, pilgrims flocked to Canterbury. They sought miracles and spiritual revelations. Some probably sought less honorable things, but they all went looking for something. On a much smaller scale, we have preserved the relics of an extremely prolific Christian author, and when given the opportunity, flock to his house to see his imitation kitchen table legs and hear about how he yelled, “Bathroom’s free!” upon leaving the bathtub. We might not believe that a swim in Lewis’s lagoon will heal our bodies or our souls, but like the pilgrims of the Middle Ages we are looking for something.  On some level, conscious or not, we believe that visiting this place will connect us to one of our only modern saints.

The problem, however, is that the Lewis of the Kilns did not exist. Places like the Kilns create a character. On this side of the Atlantic, we add to it by collecting the Lewis family papers and pouring over Lewis’s collected letters. With these elements combined, we construct an idea of who we think Lewis was. We construct how he acted, how he was perceived, whether or not we would like him or be liked by him. We start to view this character as Lewis himself. We pretty up the things that we do not like – the tar stained walls, the dislike of colleagues – and we erect places and windows In Memoriam. Once we create an image that feels true, but not true enough to be unworthy of adoration, we forget about the deliberate changes. We take the construction as fact.

One of the anecdotes on the tour relates to Joy Gresham Lewis’s sense of privacy. She was very protective of her and Lewis’s privacy - so protective, in fact, that she kept a shotgun on hand to defend it. How would she and Lewis react to this learning center-mausoleum combination? Would they walk through the rooms, hear the spiels, and feel honored? Or would there be a very real and painful sense of violation? Houses are inherently private spaces, and it would seem that The Kilns was a place where C.S. Lewis did not have to be a paragon of Christian literati. It might have been a place where C.S. Lewis didn’t have to be anyone but Jack, where he could be a husband and a stepfather first and an author second. Now instead of a home it is a place of commemoration, a place that entrenches Lewis on his pedestal and allows visitors to venerate.

The Kilns is not the only preservationist effort. Palaces around England with carefully restored and maintained state-rooms are visited by millions of people yearly. Pilgrims walk through London trying to identify the different settings and places mentioned in Great Expectations and can tour a similar house dedicated to Charles Dickens. Stratford-Upon-Avon is one of the most visited places in England solely because of its association with Shakespeare. The Kilns, however, are distinguished by the explicitly religious overtones inherent in both the preservationist effort and in the preserved. There are not many modern writers who were unapologetically and vocally Christians. People remember Lewis’s writings not only because of their quality, but also because of their religious associations. As a result, we tend to actually treat C.S. Lewis like Saint Clive Staples, and The Kilns is more like a site of religious devotion than another British tourist trap for bibliophiles.

Lewis’s grave at Holy Trinity church is a brief walk from the Kilns. Approaching the graveyard there is a sign on a wall that reads, “C.S. LEWIS’S GRAVE” and directs visitors with an arrow. The grave is a large, pale slab, well maintained with readable engravings and epitaphs. The very same graveyard bears the names of the unremembered.  There are some stones erected less than a century ago that are already irrelevant, the damp of the country has already worn down the etchings, and the grooves have filled in with moss. In the middle of such a place it is difficult to find any moderation in memory. For every million, maybe even ten million people who die and are forgotten within two generations of their death, there is one place like The Kilns where a person, made of flesh, bone, triumphs, failures and the things in between, is memorialized in minute and glamorizing detail. The vast majority of people are forgotten; but  a select few, like Lewis, are transformed into saints and remembered in painstaking revisionist detail. The only universal is that no one achieves real immortality. The Lewis we remember is not the one that lived, but the construction we have made of his life, a figure to represent intelligent and devoted Christianity, our own Saint Clive Staples.