C.S. Lewis...submissive?

This caught me by surprise. A new biography of writer C.S. Lewis dwells a bit on his interest in sadomasochism and speculates that he was submissive.

Lewis biography takes an honest approach

...we are in need of biographies such as this, that remind us that he was, after all, just a man -- and a very complicated one. The members of the C. S. Lewis Society of Oxford discuss an angelic, High Church Lewis who was a lifelong celibate -- regardless of the facts that he was married for four years and before that lived with another woman for nearly 30, or that his letters to his lifelong friend Arthur Greaves discuss both masturbation and sadomasochism. Many of Lewis's admirers never seem to grasp that they do him no favors by making him an unfallen angel -- his virtues and accomplishments would have been without merit and his life would have nothing to say to us....

Michael White, the author of a much-lauded biography of Stephen Hawking as well as works on J.R.R. Tolkien and Isaac Newton, does a competent job of depicting Lewis's life in all its richness and complexity. Here is Lewis the failed poet but accomplished prose writer, the conscientious (if sometimes bullying) teacher, who always sought to bring out the best in diligent students but could be remarkably spiteful about pupils he disliked. Here is the expansively generous Lewis, who gave his royalties to charity; who encouraged and praised Tolkien's work on ''The Lord of the Rings" even as their friendship cooled and Tolkien excoriated the Narnia chronicles. Here as well is the Lewis who led a double life as an undergraduate and Oxford Fellow, living with Janie Moore, a married woman nearly 30 years his senior in a relationship he kept a secret from university authorities and never discussed with his closest friends.

...Wilson also does a better job, with admittedly little evidence, of the vexing question of Lewis's sexuality. White notes that Janie Moore was ''bossy" and concludes that Lewis, who had lost his mother early in life, ''needed more than anything to be mothered," and makes the rather puzzling comment that his sadomasochistic streak was a ''rebellion" against this ''strongest inner drive" -- a return to childhood innocence. Wilson, on the other hand, sees Lewis's sadomasochism less as a rebellion against the impulse that led him to Moore, but as an integral part of their relationship. Throughout their life together, Lewis was at Moore's beck and call during waking hours, dropping academic duties to run errands or do housework -- ''he is as good as an extra maid," she once commented. Wilson remarks, ''Some men pay prostitutes for humiliation of the most humdrum kind . . . others find emotional fulfillment in being made to scrub kitchen floors or scour out pans."