Tom Hulme
In my book Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life before Gay Liberation, I draw attention to the importance of friends in the lives of queer men. That might seem like an obvious point to make—who among us, queer or otherwise, does not rely on their friends? Yet when so many of the assumptions about Northern Ireland’s queer history have been shaped by an expectation of shame, isolation and invisibility, I felt it critical to show that queer men did not face the silence or ignorance of society on their own. Many friends were also fellow travellers, of course, sharing information about queer life and supporting each other through difficult times. But perhaps more surprising is how ostensibly ‘straight’ friends, colleagues and family members could play the same role. One of the more intriguing examples of the latter unfortunately ended up on the cutting room floor. C.S. Lewis is perhaps Belfast’s best-known writer; a lay theologian and children’s author still important enough to have journals and conferences dedicated to his craft. Because of his fame, there are surviving records that detail the life of his best friend, Arthur Greeves. I tried to include a section on their complex relationship in Belfastmen, but I could not make it work. The gravitational pull of a famous author distracted from my broader narrative, and my analysis was uncomfortably speculative – perhaps even invasive. So instead, I decided to tell a fresher story of how the forgotten Arthur Greeves discovered and understood his sexuality. Even so, as this consequently deleted extract demonstrates, the world of Lewis was pretty queer in its own way….
Arthur Greeves is remembered today only because of C.S. Lewis, the world-famous novelist and lay theologian who was born in in the same east Belfast suburb. The two men met in adolescence and first bonded over a shared love of Norse mythology, and the friendship lasted—with some ebbs and flows—until Lewis died in 1963. In the formative years of the relationship their conversations reveal some queer undertones. In one letter, dated to early 1917, Lewis described for Greeves in titillating depth the “lovely ripples of muscle and strained limbs” of the Percy Shelley memorial in Oxford. Straight after this already homoerotic observation, Lewis curiously noted how he had not recently masturbated. In another letter, a few months later, Lewis insisted that he wanted Greeves’ private company but found it difficult to “talk about those sort of things the way you do” because it seemed “indecent somehow.” Greeves, for his part, certainly longed for more than just platonic friendship. He recorded in his diaries his intense loneliness when Lewis was away at university in Oxford and his anxiety that his friend would come to harm while serving in the First World War, and he could barely hide his excitement when Lewis returned. In the early years of their correspondence, Greeves delicately quizzed Lewis about whether “love = friendship + sensual feelings,” and even complained that his friend only wanted their bond to be for the “highest plane” of existence: book and music talk rather than “so-called practical life.”
If there was any sexual frisson between the two men, it probably never went any further than just talk. Lewis spoke of how his friend’s homosexuality was “a brand of That which doesn’t appeal to me” in a letter that appears to be an attempt to let Greeves down gently. Later in life, Lewis wrote that sex between males was unimaginable and one of only two sins that had not tempted him—the other being gambling. His was instead enthusiastic about sadomasochism. Though his dreams of whipping did extend occasionally to men, it was primarily women who formed the object of his fantasies. There could easily be psychoanalytic assessments of the origins of his desires, and some Lewis scholars have speculated on his odd relationships with women. At any rate, the frankness of Lewis’s reflections on sadomasochism in the 1910s, and his defiant downplaying of the seriousness of the “sin” of sex between males in his memoir in the 1950s, does not suggest that admitting any homosexual desire for Greeves would have been that difficult.
By their early twenties, when Lewis formed a new relationship with the mother of a fallen comrade, Greeves could finally accept that his closest friend could not provide the sort of love he needed. Demonstrations of unrequited yearning in the young Belfastman’s diaries then decreased dramatically, as he turned his attention to potentially more suitable young men. Yet Lewis’s lack of homosexuality did not signal the end of his friendship with Arthur Greeves. Long before the author’s belated conversion to Anglicanism, he was able to understand Greeves’ desires without it lessening his own sense of a romantic friendship: an older model of male bonding that survived in Lewis’s own life, in spite of his witnessing of the sensual practices of boys at English public schools. In fact, as Greeves became more open about his sexual desires, their intense discussions often focused on the queer undertones of past and present literature. Lewis admitted that he had not considered that the work of the Ancient Greek poet Catullus could be interpreted as relating to Greeves’ “particular taste”, for example, but sensitively reassured his friend “I don’t blame you in the very least, still less do I suggest that I wouldn’t have felt just the same in your position.” “Let us talk of these things when we want”, Lewis suggested carefully, “but always keep them on the side that tends to beauty, and avoid everything that tends to sordidness and beastly police court sort of scandal out of grim real life (like the O[scar] Wilde story)”.
After Greeves discovered the sexologist and socialist Edward Carpenter, the Sage of Sheffield’s pioneering writing became another topic of conversation with Lewis. His better-read friend now began to recommend books in which he had already spotted information about male same-sex desire. An autobiography of the medieval Italian artist and author Benvenuto Cellini, for example, touched on Greeves’ “penchant” and so would be “very interesting in ‘that way’”, Lewis told him. Greeves was even able to talk about his meetings with other young men and how his homosexual yearnings were developing. In early 1918, Lewis playfully asked Greeves whether he was “still bound” to one young man “by the chains of desire as well as by ‘pure’ friendship?” A couple of months later, in reply to Greeves’ defiant expression in his belief in the virtues of Uranianism, Lewis relayed that he would tentatively stand by his friend:
Congratulations old man. I am delighted that you have had the moral courage to form your own opinion, independently, in defiance of the old taboos. I am not sure that I agree with you: but, as you hint in your letter, this penchant is a sort of mystery only to be fully understood by those who are made that way—and my views on it can be at best but emotion.
Arthur Greeves still struggled with his desires, which explains his enthusiasm for the “cure” of psychoanalysis when he discovered Freudian-inspired works a few years later. Even so, drawing on the support of a childhood friend had provided both the emotional and intellectual help he desperately needed in the early stages of understanding his own queerness.
Bibliographical Note
My main sources were the letters collected in Walter Hooper (ed), They Stand Together: the Letters of CS Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963) (London, 1979), the Arthur Greeves Diaries Collection at the Marion E. Wade Center (Wheaton, IL), and C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (London, 1955). For other treatments of the friendship, see George Sayer, Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis (Wheaton, IL, 1994), Josh A. Kohm Jr., The Unknown Garden of Another’s Heart: the Surprising Friendship between C.S. Lewis and Arthur Greeves (Eugene, OR, 2022), and Alister McGrath, C.S. Lewis: A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet (London, 2013).
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