C S. Lewis

...But there is simply not enough of a dramatic context for us to make such a subtle judgment about "tone...

...Does it matter...

...I n the second place, there is the ques- tionn of those "records...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 41...

...You have waited, not only without complaint but full of encouragement, while chance after chance slipped away and when the goal receded farthest from sight...

...Moore were not lovers...

...concerning the genuineness of his sentiments...

...One of the most famous, for example, and one that Lewis made more than once was the following: There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be one with the something which is at once the awful haunter of Nature and the giver of the moral law...

...It was this which made him give up amateur theology and begin writing children's fantasy—as well as, inevitably, providing him with a ready-made witch...

...But Lewis was neither vain nor self-deluding, and Mr...

...He has written quite a good book about C. S. Lewis the literary critic, the mythographer, the science fiction and children's fantasy writer...

...Irrelevant...

...Wilson sets much store by a famous "defeat" suffered in debate by Lewis at the hands of the Wittgensteinian Catholic, Elizabeth Anscombe, at the Oxford Socratic Society in 1948...

...sufficient warrant for his young biographer, who was 13 when his subject died and who never met him, to call them Jack and Warnie at every appearance...

...They may find in themselves an unexpected expansion of the imaginative capacity to understand from within this old-fashioned clerk, or scholar, whom too many are now content to patronize...

...There are moments when one sympathizes with Herod...

...Indeed, Wilson is especially good when he writes in the preface to this volume of the curious feud between these two factions over the relics and the reputation of their saint-in-common—a dispute in which he sensibly takes neither side but which he rather sees as an indication of the difficulties and paradoxes of his subject...

...There is also a lot of mumbo-jumbo about Wittgenstein and how Lewis didn't know much about Biblical scholarship and suchlike footling displays of Wilson's own learning that, in the end, bear little on the subject of what Lewis himself would have been the first to admit were mostly rather basic intellectual defenses of belief against merely popular and unconsidered objections to it...

...They were neither stupid nor wicked...

...The chapter dealing with his conversion to religious belief is called "Redemption by Parricide," and itsthesis is that Lewis "was not able to see the significance of these two relationships in his religious, as well as in his whole emotional, development...

...The crucifixion is sufficient evidence that Lewis's dichotomy made sense to a first century Jew, even if it does not to Mr...

...Even worse is his picking up of what were much more casual intimacies as his normal way of referring to two of the most important people in Lewis's life...

...What are we to make of that...

...To be sure, he is a clement and a generous judge, but it is his acting as judge at all that bothers me...

...Wilson, it turns out, was not fogeyish enough...

...On the whole, the Christian enthusiasts among Lewis's admirers will be disappointed in this book, but there is in it much sympathy for Lewis, both as a man and as a writer...

...As that rarest of creatures, a literary man who is also a Christian, Wilson is perhaps uniquely well placed to do justice to his subject's various careers...

...Wilson makes three arguments of his own against this proposition, none of which seems nearly so compelling, either rhetorically or logically, as Lewis's dichotomy...

...22.50 James Bowman 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1990 Lewis the benefit of the doubt (surely a very small one...

...In the same way, Wilson mistakes Lewis's most generous tribute to his father on the occasion of his winning, after many disappointments, a fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford: First, let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the generous support, extended over six years, which alone has enabled me to hang on like this...

...For one thing, all the major characters go by nicknames...

...but most modern biographers—though they might find him interesting as a psychological case study —would not give Lewis, as a thinker on the subject closest to their own hearts, the time of day...

...This is to misunderstand the point that Lewis is making...

...In commenting on The Allegory of Love, Lewis's first great work of literary history, for example, he writes: It is a big hearted, generous book...

...especially when you consider that, through most of his life and in keeping with the custom of the time, his best friends called Lewis`Lewis...

...That Lewis was always "Jack," his brother "Warnie," within the family does not seem to me James Bowman is American correspondent of the Spectator of London...

...The claim is so shocking—a paradox and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible...

...Moore was, at least partly, a sexual one and that he was haunted by lifelong guilt for having hated his father...

...In the first place, the dearth of biographical evidence about Lewis's private inner life sometimes requires its explicator to "read" him in ways that would receive very short shrift in any libel action...

...Wilson quotes some of those who knew Lewis to the effect that he was extraordinarily uninterested in the private lives even of his most intimate friends—and that he expected them to take as little interest in his...

...In view of such a personal idiosyncrasy, it would be surprising if any reasonably objective modern biographer did not smell a story under so many layers of protective reticence...

...Iknow that such a view of these mat- ters cannot but be universally anathematized by the fraternity of modern biographers...

...Lewis is relying here on our concluding—surely reasonably?—on the balance of probability that it is not...

...By using nicknames which continually remind the reader of a playful affection for Mrs...

...The real doubt is cast instead upon Wilson's jerry-built theory of Oedipal complexities—which, by the way, he does not attempt to give a specifically Freudian slant...

...Apart from some dubious attempts at philosophical disputation, to which I shall return, most of the book after the early chapters gives us a Lewis which all but the idolatrous among his admirers will recognize and appreciate...

...There is no middle way...

...They have a literary and historical context which requires the sort of imaginative adjustment for modern minds that Lewis was so good about promoting when it came to the medieval texts he discusses in The Discarded Image but that he neglected in his apologetics...

...That's pretty obviously a case of making the facts fit the theory instead of the other way around...

...It is because Wilson claims a basic sympathy with his subject that his amateur psychoanalysis seems like a betrayal...

...Thank you again and again .. . Wilson comments: "In the tone of all this, there is something unnatural...

...Non sequitur...

...How often can I afford to wait?' was everybody's question...

...This is especially noticeable in his account of the Christian apologetics,which is the side of Lewis that is probably best known in America...

...Whatever may have been the precise connotations of these terms to Jesus's contemporaries it is clear that they were considered blasphemous in the extreme—as, indeed, they would be in any reasonably pious monotheistic culture...

...Lewis does not set out to make himself cleverer than the reader, still less cleverer than the authors whom he is discussing...

...What "records," quoth Wilson, is he talking about...

...they simply, and without benefit of the "records," took him to be the lunatic and blasphemer which Lewis's formulation acknowledges to be one of the two possible conclusions of a reasonable man...

...The objections to Wilson's persistent attempts to sniff it out seem to me to be two...

...Thirdly, and again attempting to hoist Lewis with his own literary-historical petard, Wilson argues that terms like "Son of Man" or "Son of God" are not to be understood as self-defining...

...It is dreadful to think that other people's grandchildren may one day rise up and call one amiable...

...As a literary historian, Lewis upheld the right of an author to be assessed on his own terms and not those which his posthumous critics, with very different presuppositions about the world, try to impose upon him...

...Wilson's offense against his memory is not so much the inconvenient truth as it is a gratuitous familiarity and an unstated but pervasive sense of his own moral and intellectual qualification to sit in judgment...

...The New Testament is a collection of records, all considering the nature of Christ from different points of view—to say nothing of the records of a furious debate on the same subject among the fathers of the Churchduring the first three centuries A.D...

...But he is much less well disposed to Lewis the theologian than to Lewis the critic and literary historian...

...Even the psychologizing about his youth and early manhood is now so much a part of the modern biographer's standard issue tool kit that most will simply take it for granted...

...Lewis himself seems to have regarded the rencontre as a defeat, but if Wilson's very sketchy account of it is anything to go by, Lewis would have had a much easier time of it in disposing of him than he did in parrying Ms...

...Nevertheless, Lewis himself, Lewis the man, would have absolutely hated the book...

...T hus does Saki, the British humor- 1 ist and short story writer H. H. Munro, reflect upon one of the little-remarked consequences of our progressive view of history...

...there always have been men who have gone about despairing of the Future, and when the Future arrives it says nice, superior things about their having acted according to their lights...

...It is part of Wilson's purpose to convince us that Lewis had an Oedipal problem: that his relationship with Mrs...

...This may be partly because he has the typical Anglican's dislike of both earnest evangelicals and converted Catholics, who between them often seem to make up the bulk of Lewis's most enthusiastic admirers...

...and few of them had at their back those who were both able and willing to keep them in the field for so long...

...And for those among them who can take the troubleto trace the continuity between Lewis's literary criticism, on which Wilson is so good, and his Christian faith, where he is better than he is on the apologetics, there may be a positively Lewisian experience...

...He even had a name for the philosophy which lay behind such a practice: "the personal heresy" --`a vivid example of which," Wilson disarmingly admits, "would be the present biography...

...W. Norton/334 pp...

...His , murderous meditation is brought to mind by the rather patronizing tone of this new biography of C. S. Lewis by A. N. Wilson, who was the original "young fogey"—one of that little band of English social conservatives of the early to mid-1980s who were said to have taken their style of dress from their fathers and their opinions from their grandfathers...

...In the long course I have seen men, at least my equals in ability and qualifications, fall out for the lack of it...

...Moore and a snobbish contempt for his father—both of indeterminate force in life as Lewis actually lived it—Wilson prepossesses us in favor of accepting his own psychological analysis of the situation...

...The records are not those of theological disputation, which are indeed of too various a character to compel belief in the truth of Jesus's claims, but those of simple historical and biographical fact: Is the life of the man Jesus as recorded in the gospels consistent with the view that he was a raving lunatic...

...If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, then you must submit to the second...

...He writes here the words he feels that he ought to write...

...Wilson...

...When he comes to comment on-Lew-is the advocate, however, he is too often dismissive, in the old condescending way, of arguments which he seems to have taken little trouble to understand...

...Moore, his adoptive mother, is invariably called "Minto," after a pet name he gave her because of a kind of candy she liked, and his father is "the P'daytabird" because the Lewis brothers would thus occasionally, and privately, mock the old man's Irish accent...

...For the sympathy is real enough...

...Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type or else He was, and is, precisely what He said...

...Yet he himself does precisely what he praises Lewis for not doing—that is, setting out to make himself cleverer than his subject...

...It is true that, in Lewis's case, the avoidance of the personal was taken to an extreme and bore him away from the intellectual mainstream of his time, which was running in England with only slightly less precipitancy than in the rest of the world toward Marxist and Freudian attempts to account for old books in terms other than their own...

...There is a reason for such familiarity...

...when Lewis, in Surprised by Joy, draws a veil over what we would otherwise consider two of his most important emotional relationships, we patronize him by assuming that he didn't know what he was about...

...In its absence, we must give C. S. LEWIS: A BIOGRAPHY A. N. Wilson/W...

...It's clear enough why he thinks this: if Lewis's animus toward his father were as weighty as Wilson claims it is, these words would be rather unnatural...

...He is similarly appreciative of The Discarded Image Studies in Words, and An Experiment in Criticism, noticing about all four books that their great strengths lie in their success at enabling their readers to escape from the limitations of their own, inevitably modern, points of view and imaginatively to enter into those of writers long dead...

...H e has at least this much of a point: Lewis, in common with most Britons of the period (and, to a lesser extent, even today), had a distaste for the public airing of personal and intimate details of one's private life and, in particular, a deep-rooted suspicion of those who would delve into an author's psychology in order to "explain" his work...

...When Rousseau asks us in his Confessions to see him whole, we are justified in doing a little delving and interpreting in order to measure his achievement against what he set out to do...

...Obviously, if a biographical subject is a vain or self-deluding person, his biographer has a duty to offend him—or his ghost—with the truth...

...Like an enthusiastic guide in a foreign country, he is anxious to share with us the unexpected treasures he has found and which we might, without his help, have missed...

...Anscombe...

...So Wilson assures us, for example, that "while nothing will ever be proved on either side, the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs...

...First he claims that Lewis must therefore have supposed that Christ's Jewish contemporaries who did not believe in him were either "very stupid or damnably wicked...

...This is typical, however, of the biographer's style of argument...

...If we have learned anything from him, we ought to do him the courtesy to treat him in the same way...

...That Wilson does not do this is my second objection to his psychological approach: it is not true to the spirit of his subject...