C.S. Lewis: A Biography
Eastland, Terry
The Alternative: An American Spectator • June/July 1975 • Volume 8, Number 9 1967 Special Book Review/Terry Eastland The Amazing Grace of C. S. Lewis • Despite his death in 1963, Clive Staples...
...Lewis' lifelong care for a widow, Mrs...
...Lewis: A Biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich $6.95 Lewis wrote that poetry should be poet-less, by which he meant that poetry should and can be judged on its own merits, quite apart from either the psyche' of the poet or the events of the poet's life...
...but it is the strength of C.S...
...So much for the sake of introduction...
...To hear Green's and Hooper's account, Lewis received "what he missed in his twenties" by a brilliant stroke of serendipity: he entered into both civil and religious marriage ceremonies for simply pragmatic and charitable reasons, but upon Davidman's recovery he found himself in a rich and fully consummated marriage...
...His own life, in fact, was permeated, or as Lewis said in a different context, "shot through" with the Christian faith, and his writings demonstrated this full coloration...
...Lewis learned that his particular experiences pointed beyond themselves to something transcendent, which he could not, by definition, force into his own net...
...Lewis would not object in the least if one were to say that most of his works are, in a word, authorless...
...he is a man who says look at that and points...
...Perhaps Lewis' and Davidman's secret differs from Green's and Hooper's account...
...In Surprised by Joy, Lewis winnowed the events of his life to leave only those which he thought obviously connected to his abandonment of Absolute Idealism, his embrace of Theism, and finally his conversion to Christianity...
...Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real...
...One of Lewis' friends objected to this inundation but Lewis replied characteristically: "One of the contentions of the book is that the decay of our old classical learning is a contributory cause of atheism...
...Green and Hooper would rather not pry anyway:"In a more civilized age Lewis' silence would be accepted as an absolute embargo on prying further into private affairs...
...He ate dinner and then read and discussed English literature before tea and a deserved bed...
...That's the sort of thing he cares about...
...Admittedly, the criticism here is no better than conjecture, since it is not ventured with the "less awkward facts" in hand...
...He was lucky to leave Malvern before the power of this system had done him any lasting damage...
...but one wonders if Lewis didn't have more of a desire for Joy...
...After filling in at University College as an interim tutor, Lewis received a fellowship in English at Magdalen in 1925, where he began his long Oxford tenure...
...No biography could bring as much pleasure as any one of Lewis' prose works...
...This supplementation is, in fact, one of the strengths of Green's and Hooper's book...
...No surprise, either, that Lewis, no Bunyan as far as formal education was concerned, showered the book with Greek and Latin quotations...
...Green first met Lewis in 1938 and became a close friend and critic of his works...
...And those who have never read him will wonder why veteran readers keep coming back for second and third helpings of the same book...
...But if "fully or variously avenging the emotions" involved a saturnalian good time, a possibility even suggested by Green and Hooper, well, so what...
...In one of his first essays, "The Personal Heresy in Criticism," C.S...
...Everyone expected Davidman to die soon, but then she suddenly and miraculously recovered, and Lewis found himself for the next three years in marital bliss, in which "no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied...
...Lewis: A Biography...
...Fifty years later Warren Lewis wrote: "The fact is that he should never have been sent to a private school at all...
...Tbe Silver Chair sources, Green and Hooper glean the facts necessary to tell the story "as best we could...
...Here, Lewis wrote to a friend, he was learningto dive, "which is a great change in my life and has important (religious) connections...
...You mnnot hope and also think about hoping at the same moment...
...Facing eviction as an alien from England, Davidman was given citizenship when Lewis magnanimously consented to a civil wedding at the Oxford registry...
...In the long run such neglects proved extraordinarily beneficial...
...Especially interesting would have been the reaction of Lewis, a dinosaur in matters of philosophy as well as most other things, to the trends in English philosophy after the idealism of Bradley and Green had faded...
...or that he constantly appealed to the imagination in the understanding of difficult philosophical and theological ideas...
...and by his temperament he was bound to be a misfit, an object of suspicion within the collective-minded and standardizing system...
...His desire in childhood to be a poet had now at Oxford been transmuted into a desire to be an allegorist...
...he started to become a philosopher...
...Thus, the curious gap in Lewis' life remains pretty much the same...
...Lewis to show the growth, beyond the early adult years, of Lewis' romantic vision and his classical mind...
...His reason: "pure friendship and expediency...
...hence, he read and read, and just plain could not satisfy his appetite for those romantic books which indicated something further...
...Apart from satisfying our simple curiosity, it is hard to see why the obscure seven months in 1918-1919 mean much for an appreciation of Lewis' life...
...He stopped for tea but then picked up a Latin text until lunch...
...Typed single-spaced by Lewis' brother Warren, these unpublished papers concern the Lewis family from 1850 to 1930 and fill 3,565 pages in eleven volumes...
...Indeed, it is difficult to see, on the surface, why the unveiling of a life spent 29 years as an Oxford fellow and nine years as a Cambridge professor would do the public any appreciable service...
...Lewis went on to write better and more readable books than Regress, but the wellsprings of his work, no matter the genre, were always romanticism and classicism...
...said Jill...
...No surprise, then, that Lewis' first full-length prose work was the Pilgrim's Regress, an allegory inspired by Bunyan' s work...
...But his appeal to so many readers was not owing to any ability to ladle portions of Christianity upon whichever genre was at hand...
...She also felt curiously shy...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator June/ July 1975 7...
...Of these works, Lewis' best known have been The Screwtape Letters, which landed him on the cover of Time magazine, Mere Christianity, a brief but solid apologetic for the Christian faith, and the Chronicles of Narnia, which are becoming, in their seven volumes, classics for children...
...Lewis' nightmares...
...Green and Hooper, moreover, intend to tell it straight: "What is needed is a framework of straightforward fact...
...his first meeting with T.S...
...his mates considered him a social bounder, and before one year had elapsed, young Lewis left Malvern for the house of a private tutor...
...Accordingly, Lewis continued: "The poet is not a man who asks me to look at him...
...Eliot...
...his avoidance of certain foods because of their alleged aphrodisiacal qualities...
...All I can or need say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very or variously avenged...
...So shortly before his sixteenth birthday, Lewis traveled to a private tutor, William T. Kirkpatrick, who instructed him for the two and a half years before he matriculated at Oxford...
...the other concerns the circumstances of his marriage to Joy Davidman...
...That which I greatly feared had come upon me...
...Price, the logician...
...Surprised by Joy "Supposing I told you I'd been in a place where animals can talk and where there are—er—enchantments and dragons—and—well, all sorts of things you have in fairy tales...
...Organic," moreover, may be the best characterization of the way Lewis' life grew from his adolescent romanticism and his classical education...
...No chance to become well-rounded and finely tuned to the world, after Kirkpatrick...
...You do not need to do anything, you need only to stop doing something—to abstain from all attempt at self-preservation—to obey the command which Saint Augustine heard in a different context, Securus to projice...
...Crombie...
...If these close associations have pushed them to the point of genuflection before the memory of Lewis, the same intimacy has also, quite fortunately, yielded them access to mountains of documents, papers, and letters, the most monumental of which are the Lewis Papers...
...But other events are equally telling about the course of Lewis' life during those years...
...With the help of such private The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1975 5 A Taste of the Writing of C. S. Lewis Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true...
...However, I do not wish to see this field glutted, and I believe this estimation will be shared by many Lewis readers...
...Lewis: A Biography for just that reason...
...but I would have thought it necessary to include more about Lewis as a philosopher...
...the Socratic Club, a debating organization which pitted atheists or agnostics against Christians...
...Shortly thereafter, Davidman was struck with cancer, and close to death in a hospital...
...Lewis: A Biography...
...the more I follow the pointing of his finger the less I can possibly see of him...
...Already at fourteen his intelligence was such that he would have fitted in better among undergraduates than among schoolboys...
...That Lewis saw spiritual analogues in his natural experiences was typical of his life and his writings, and the incredible fact, the fact which set Lewis apart from many other Christian writers of his era, was that these connections were fully organic, never awkward, never forced...
...But during 6 The Alternative: An American Spectator June/July 1975 the days of his Kirkpatrick tutorship the classical readings began to seep slowly into Lewis' sensibility...
...And they are right to assume that many thousands of Lewis readers will read C.S...
...Those bothered by this account can hope that one of thirty-odd Lewis researchers who now labor in the Bodleian Library at Oxford will turn new sod in the production of a better biography...
...and it is scarcely less plain that to do so is already to be on the verge of allegory...
...In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed...
...I have no choice about this reticence...
...They begin by covering thoroughly the landscape of Lewis' early years, which Lewis himself had sketched in his spiritual autobiography Surprised by Joy, and which constitute a genuine wonder when juxtaposed against the odds of anyone today receiving an equivalent upbringing...
...Much of C.S...
...Green and Hooper introduce, for example, the fact that the summer of 1930 found Lewis lolling frequently upon the banks of the muddy Thames River...
...After his wife died in 1960, Lewis wrote a splendid devotional book, A Grief Observed, which shone forth with great love and devotion for his departed spouse...
...had been a futile attempt to contemplate the enjoyed...
...One concerns a lacuna evinced by Lewis in Surprised by Joy...
...To their credit, Lewis' first biographers, Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, are aware of these difficulties, and from the start they refuse the temptations of employing biography or psychoanalysis for the sake of criticizing Lewis' works...
...Certainly, then, one is aware of a uniquely Christian sensibility in the author of even such nonreligious books as a volume on sixteenth-century English literature...
...As much as I am in sympathy with the approach Green and Hooper have taken in this biography, I must enter the caveat that upon occasion the authors seem to be snared not by the temptation of abandoning facts for novel speculation, but rather by the temptation of selecting the less awkward facts about the life of Lewis...
...Abstaining from all attempt at self-preservation" invited no existentialist leap into the void, but called for a posture of stillness, upon which the natural or spiritual order waited with salvation...
...No woodshop, metalshop, typing, or gym for C.S...
...In providing this framework Green and Hooper tacitly recognize that the sole justification for telling Lewis' story is for its own sake...
...Hence, the transition to University College, Oxford, was smoothly accomplished...
...All of these answers, of course, contain a trace of truth, but the overwhelming reason for Lewis' popularity has been his commitment to Christianity...
...He digested his food during a solitary walk in the woods before working with Kirkpatrick through theearly evening...
...But the circumstances of Lewis' marriage have more significance than that aroused by curiosity...
...In his youth Lewis strove for what he termed " Joy"— the pang of sweet desire for the Unknown —which had been occasioned by reading Nordic literature and listening to Wagner...
...Born in Belfast, Ireland, in 1898, Lewis barely stuck his foot into the closing door of the nineteenth century, but even for this inch he must in later life have been thankful...
...Similarly, in the case of the spiritual event, believing in God, the end of a hanging onto self found the grace of God pulling the self into redemption...
...No similar period occurred again in Lewis' life, and anyone interested in what Lewis soberly thought about sex can read his views in The Four Loves or Mere Christianity...
...These are all nice, chatty items and they will enlarge the perspective held by many Lewis readers...
...To mix the fare, Lewis read Boswell, Herodotus, Tristram Shandy, the Essays of Elia, and Andrew Lang's History of English Literature during his daily teas...
...Precocious (Lewis was writing fantasy when he was six), he entered a private school, Malvern, which ordinarily would have been conducive to the reflective life but which had begun already a slide into mediocrity...
...and every metaphor is an allegory in little...
...Lewis, "Jack," as he was called...
...Basil Mitchell, now the Professor of Philosophy of the Christian Religion at Oxford...
...However reckless the idea of abandoning self may seem to others, this idea was to Lewis a first principle of living...
...Another First in English Literature and Language having been won in 1923, Lewis was well on his way towards becoming, as Austin Farrer once said, "the best read man any of us ever is likely to meet...
...Lewis was soon discovered out of his element...
...The Screwtape Letters ...it is plain that to fight against 'Temptation' is also to explore the inner world...
...I saw that all my waitings and watchings for Joy...
...To me it was red beef and strong beer...
...and his 1960 trip to Greece with his wife Joy Davidman...
...or a quiver in the diaphragm...
...Lewis, and also from the fact that Green and Hooper gently discourage inquiry into a couple of the less comprehensible areas of Lewis' life...
...Davidman as his wife, and one suspects so when the authors remark: "The progress of the relationship between Lewis and Joy was and remains, as it should be, their own secret...
...There Lewis achieved distinction with a Double First in Literae Humaniores, or "Greats," as it is called, a course demanding intimacy with classical Greek and Latin texts, philosophy, archeology, and history...
...his habit of calling Clare Boothe Luce "Clara Bootlace" ; his swims in the nude at Parson's Pleasure...
...In profiling Lewis during his Oxford and Cambridge days, Green and Hooper cast off dozens of choice items which, although of little consequence in themselves, will enter what has now come to be called "Lewisiana...
...Moore, J.L...
...The Alternative: An American Spectator • June/July 1975 • Volume 8, Number 9 1967 Special Book Review/Terry Eastland The Amazing Grace of C. S. Lewis • Despite his death in 1963, Clive Staples Lewis remains the most widely read Oxford don of this century...
...If Lewis, like the poet, was a man who asked others not to look at him but at those things to which he pointed, why the publication of a first of its kind: C.S...
...They "follow up the evidence as far as it will take us," but they find "it does not, in fact, take us very far...
...Having met Lewis years ago, Jones later told Hooper: "That man smokes a pipe, and that man drinks liquor—but I do believe he is a Christian...
...Green and Hooper admit: "It is at this point in C.S...
...Probably Americans will be the first to enjoy the comment of Dr...
...Lewis applied the distinction immediately to his own personal search for Joy...
...Maybe this is how it all happened...
...Moore...
...and H.H...
...but no one reads Lewis in order to fathom his personality...
...Those reading Lewis for the first time usually want just another of his books...
...Under Kirkpatrick Lewis learned a schedule, about which he later said with characteristic understatement: "Some boys would not have liked it...
...Undoubtedly, Green and Hooper were forced because of space to pick and choose what to highlight...
...Those who have attended to the minutest detail of Lewis' works over the years, however, will want to know how Green and Hooper treat two difficult and very private areas of Lewis' life...
...Other similar tidbits abound: The queer eating habits of Lewis' dog, an abortive effort to launch a magazine called Portico...
...And for good reason...
...If the authors have fallen to this temptation, their fall is quite understandable: they are, if anything, worshippers of C.S...
...Bob Jones, Jr., the one from the college by the same name in South Carolina...
...At Oxford, Lewis inevitably read the hefty tomes of Samuel Alexander's Space, Time, and Deity and ')ecame convinced of the distinction between "enjoyment" and "contemplation...
...or that he was exceptionally learned, a generalist par excellence...
...and Lewis' meeting with and subsequent marriage to the American poet Joy Davidman...
...There she did not wish to die, and Lewis was in principle against having her in his house unless they were "married in the eyes of God as well as in the sight of man...
...Tolkien...
...How did you get there...
...This previously unknown quotation strikes me as one which, if I were forced to choose among all others, is most revealing about Lewis...
...Lewis often remarked that the Kirkpatrick days were the most formative and even the best...
...Furthermore, he never did cease thinking in philosophical terms or joining in philosophical debate, and the Socratic Clubdid have these philosophers in regular attendance: Elizabeth Anscombe, the pupil of Wittgenstein at Cambridge...
...Austin, and Wittgenstein are shut out completely...
...but the criticism derives from the fact that displays of reverence by Green and Hooper are not uncommon in C.S...
...In addition to Lewis' disregard for biography or psychoanalysis in the employ of criticism, Lewis himself, an extremely modest man, considered his own life of little public interest...
...the talks Lewis delivered on the BBC...
...But Bertrand Russell is only obliquely mentioned, and G.E...
...Along the way one learns, among other things, about the Inklings, a literary society which included J .R.R...
...Hooper, the expatriate North Carolinian, assumed in 1963 Lewis' personal secretaryship, a position he holds to this day...
...Until he began the road to Christian conversion, Lewis thought that Joy was in principle attainable...
...Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future...
...The only way you can—by Magic," said Eustace almost in a whisper...
...Lewis explained the distinction: "The enjoyment and the contemplation of our inner activities are incompatible...
...Hence experienced readers will wonder why a self-confessed bachelor, even a self-confessed misogynist, should ever consent to the vows of marriage, especially in the twilight of his career...
...In the case of the natural event, diving, the force of gravity pulled the body into the river, which in turn received it...
...So Green and Hooper tell the story: Joy Davidman, freshly divorced and arrived with two small sons in England in 1954, became interested in Lewis, but he seemed impervious to her charms...
...The Allegory of Love You must picture me alone in that room at Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet...
...Lewis breakfasted early and read the Iliad for several hours...
...Christianity, for Lewis, was never something laid on or painted over any underlying substratum, be it a book, an activity, or a life...
...Lewis' life that his biographers find themselves in difficulties...
...The quotations stayed...
...All this, so far, can be had easily from Lewis' Surprised by Joy...
...Several answers are plausible: that Lewis was gifted with a lucid writing style...
...We cannot speak, perhaps we can hardly think, of an 'inner conflict' without a metaphor...
...This same period of time also marked his slow conversion to Christianity, superbly chronicled in Surprised by Joy, and well supplemented in C.S...
...Green and Hooper have found another comment on diving made years later by Lewis in one of his notebooks: "Nothing is simpler than this art...
...Lewis details the labors and discussions with others which went into the writing of many of Lewis' books...
...Lewis was a member of the Church of England and he maintained an unswerving faith in the traditional doctrines of Christianity, including original sin, heaven and hell, the resurrection of Christ, and even the Second Coming...
...Scrubb felt terribly awkward as he said this and got red in the face...
...All that such watching and waiting ever could find would be either an image...
...So on March 21, 1957, the two were married in the hospital by an Anglican priest...
...After all, he intended to become a philosopher as an undergraduate, and his conversion to Christianity necessitated the traversing of heady philosophical terrain...
...As one might guess, this neologism is the product of Americans who, as Lewis himself noticed, have a tendency to lionize...
...About the first, Lewis bequeathed to his readership a large puzzle when, concerning the period from May 25, 1918 to January 1919, during which he was convalescing from a wound suffered in the First World War, he wrote: "I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted...
...His books, which now total 51, display a variety of genres: literary criticism, cultural history, popular theology, metaphysical fantasy, science fiction, children's stories, poetry, and even good old hard-nosed polemic...
Vol. 8 • June 1975 • No. 9
