BY G. CONNOR SALTER

Like many millennials raised in evangelical homes in the 2000s, I discovered the Inkling at a young age. I still remember the vivid orange dragon Eustace on the cover of a Dawn Treader audiobook my parents played for me. I know I was between four and six when I heard the audiobook. It was the same time I started receiving Lord of the Rings Burger King toys, making it the period when the Lord of the Rings movies appeared. By my mid-teens, I had devoured at least three C.S. Lewis beginner biographies and read Lord of the Rings through once.

One of those beginner biographies, a profile in a book of Christian heroes, introduced me to the Mrs. Moore story.  Lewis met Paddy Moore while serving in France during World War I. After Paddy’s 1918 death, Lewis fulfilled a promise to care for Paddy’s mother, Janie, and his sister, Maureen. So, as the Christian heroes book informed me, Lewis kindly cared for Mrs. Moore for the rest of her life, and she became a second mother to him.

You can imagine my reaction in 2020 when a posthumously released interview with Lewis scholar Walter Hooper, showed there was more to the story. Hooper reported that Lewis had an affair with Mrs Moore that lasted a little over a decade.

I can think of ways to make myself feel better about the real Mrs. Moore story. Lewis wasn’t a Christian at the time. The affair ended when he found faith. But above it all, I have to face one thing. It means Lewis was human. Not the saintly professor-Kirke-like figure I imagined listening to the Dawn Treader. Even after our undragoning, where we become new creations like Eustace, being human is messy. This side of heaven, we all contain God’s beauty and a sinful nature. Every stained glass hero portrait I carry must be broken as I realize that hero was human.

Some of us find admitting our humanity easier than others. One of Lewis’s great friends in the 1940s was Charles Williams, author of everything from lay theology to supernatural thrillers to Arthurian poetry. Lois Lang-Sims sought Williams’ spiritual advice and recalled a surprising lunch conversation in May 1944. They had been discussing Dante, and she suggested that Dante’s idealized love poetry missed the point. Wouldn’t a regular human relationship be better? Williams answered, “But child, what if his humanity were not human?” Biographer Grevel Lindop notes that Williams seems to have been describing himself—maybe feeling he couldn’t love. While Williams found it easy to impress women, his relationships with them were often odd. He never had a conventional affair, but many women sought his spiritual advice, and he admitted many of them fell in love with him. Sometimes, he used that affection, giving them little punishments or controlling spiritual advice. Lang-Sims eventually refused to play Williams’ games, and their friendship ended.

I am somewhat comforted by the fact Williams may have repented of his behavior. In an online conversation with a Williams scholar who interviewed many of his friends and spiritual pupils, I learned his widow’s letters indicate Williams regretted his actions near his life’s end. The repentance doesn’t excuse the sin. It challenges me to remember that he was a very human mix of flaws as well as admirable traits. Wisdom as well as messy choices.

I could go on about other Inklings or their friends who made messy choices.

I understand some of the choices when I see the context. I recently talked with another Inklings enthusiast about Dorothy L Sayers and her illegitimate son, John Anthony Fleming. John Anthony was born in 1924 from Sayers’ relationship with car salesman Bill White, whom she discovered was married only after becoming pregnant. Sayers left John Anthony in the care of a cousin who operated a foster home, Ivy Shrimpton, and became his financial guardian some years later (an arrangement that allowed Sayers to pay for his upbringing without having court documents unveiled that would have publicly identified his mother). The friend felt it inexcusable that Sayers never told John Anthony she was his mother. I gently pointed out that she planned to. Sayers biographer Colin Duriez reports she began planning to adopt John Anthony after her 1926 marriage to Oswald Atherton “Mac” Fleming. Unfortunately, Mac’s disintegrating mental health quashed any possibility that children could live in their house.

Other choices I still wrestle with. I still don’t know what to think of the Mrs. Moore story or Hooper’s comments that Lewis saw caring for her as penance.

I’ve been fortunate to find others who love the Inklings and help me wrestle with these questions. We all know we are in danger of building a mythology about these brilliant people who shared ideas in the Eagle and Child’s Rabbit Room and stories in Lewis’ Magdalen College rooms. We all know we are in danger of going even beyond mythology to idealizing the Inklings as saints. “The great evangelical St. Lewis,” as one of my friends observed.

I asked the same friend her feelings about Williams’ behavior with women. She answered, “I still struggle with it. The only thing that helps me is remembering he was broken and in need of grace, and we are all broken and in need of grace.”