C.S. Lewis' Romantic Egoism

...Once he finally recognized that, like his father, he was primarily a storyteller, he composed The Chronicles of Narnia to recreate the atmosphere of "joy" that animated his youth...

...Lewis has Merlin awake from centuries of sleep to save England from an environmental disaster brought on by scientific experiments...

...Warnie, who survived his brother by a decade, resented Hooper's interference and left the papers in his possession to Wheaton College in Illinois, Billy Graham's alma mater and the repository of an extensive collection of manuscripts by Christian authors...

...They stayed together until she died, despite the fact that she remained married to an absent husband...

...Lewis' best writing supported his critical insight that literature helps us mythologize our lives...

...Indeed, Walter Hooper, the editor of the posthumous writings, finds this breach of canon law so disturbing, he insists that Lewis was celibate throughout his life and that the marriage was arranged strictly to obtain a visa for Gresham...

...In addition, he has written fascinating pieces on author/believers ranging from Montague Summers and Iris Murdoch to J.R.R...

...Wilson argues that the "failure to understand the kind of writer Lewis was—a Romantic egoist in the tradition of Wordsworthand Yeats," has led to a misreading of him...

...Jack's mother died when he was nine, leaving her husband devastated...

...From his college days to middle age, Lewis fancied himself a philosopher...

...Moore's demise, Lewis fell in love with Joy Gresham, an American divorcée who had traveled to England to meet him...

...When he returned from the front at age 20 to continue his studies at Oxford, which had been abruptly interrupted by his induction, he moved in with the bereaved Mrs...

...The writer inherited his penchant for a pointed story from his Irish father...

...Wilson guesses, from Lewis' confessed streak of sadomasochism, that he took pleasure in subservience...

...So profoundly did this book affect me that only recently have I realized how many of the attitudes expressed in it I adopted as my own...

...So it is understandable that the notably acerbic Wilson admires Lewis as satirist most...

...Moore...

...Shortly after Mrs...

...The masterpiece in Lewis' rogues' gallery of comic monsters is the portrait of his father in Surprised by Joy...

...Even my interest in becoming a literary critic dates from reading it...

...One may recall that the agnostic side of academia has found the private life of T.S...

...Confusion about Lewis' private life and moral beliefs has persisted, Wilson maintains, because of the rival cults that have sprung up around his literary remains...

...he would cry while confronting the monthly accounts, and the terrorized boys would then lie anxiously awake at night...

...The biographer feels a kinship with his subject, too...

...Warnie, who eventually joined the household, was baffled by his brother's self-imposed humiliation, and called it "the rape of J'slife...

...Modeled on Yeats, the character is a blend of occult nonsense and genuine wisdom...

...Wilson, citing the diaries and family accounts, proves that the two had in fact begun an affair long before the wedding...

...Readers familiar with the literature on Lewis, or merely the academic gossip about him, will not be surprised that Wilson devotes considerable effort to trying to demystify his subject's peculiar romantic life...

...Wilson surmises from the diaries that afterward relations between Minto and Jack became platonic...

...Intellectuals with religious convictions do not necessarily cultivate charity toward all...

...Lewis, born November 29,1898, told of a childhood where books made a greater impact than friends, described what it was like to have a charming yet weak father who inspired love tinged with disapproval in his progeny, and recounted the sadistic tyranny of prep schools (he nicknamed his first school "Belsen" for its brutal policies...

...For 33 years Jack lived with a woman 26 years his senior—the mother of another young Irishman, Paddy Moore, who had been his friend in the Army during World War I and was killed in action...

...Wilson is of course both a scholar and a critic himself...

...Lewis also wrote many popular works of Christian apologetics, a science fiction/fantasy trilogy for adults, and, in his capacity as an Oxford teacher of Renaissance literature, some of the most engaging criticism since Samuel Johnson...

...But in his 30s he experienced a conversion that his descriptions have made as familiar as those of St...

...We're all going to the poorhouse...

...Not a few of Jack's fellow dons thought him as exasperating as his adolescent self had found Albert...

...Many have withered opponents with their cutting sarcasm...

...The seven enchanting fantasies capture a child's wonder in a world where marvelous possibilities seem to lurk around every corner...

...and The Great Divorce—about souls from hell on a sightseeing tour of heaven...

...Eliot—Lewis' contemporary—equally hard to fathom...

...His inanity was a burden as well...

...That Hideous Strength, one of the outer-planetary fantasies, overflows with acid portraits of university colleagues like Bertrand Russell, who Lewis believed were fatuous in their learning and arrogant in their belief in "progress...

...Then I sampled the rest of this prolific author's output...

...if the bride is dying of cancer, questions about motives are virtually inevitable...

...Wilson notes that the facile, bullying logic of Mere Christianity and Miracles (books as irritating to the theologically or philosophically minded as they are beloved by fundamentalists) resembles a lawyer's argument to a jury...

...But supremely, he limned the intense sweetness and longing that certain lines of poetry, or a landscape, or music can evoke...

...As a student Lewis had embraced atheism—overjoy ed to rid himself of a God he associated with the capricious temper of his father...

...Joy Gresham's first husband being alive, the Anglican Church did not recognize the legitimacy of her union with Lewis, therefore critics of his rectitude would hardly have been quieted...

...At 15 I stumbled upon his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and recognized a kindred spirit...

...Augustine...

...Ibelieve—'saidl, butFather interrupted: ? very much doubt if he used the Italian calligraphy at all.'" Still, in many ways Lewis turned out to be a chip off the old block...

...From there I graduated to his satires: The Screwtape Letters—avuncular observations on human foibles from a senior devil in the infernal bureaucracy to a novice tempter...

...Jack loved Joy Gresham deeply, and her death had the effect of finally giving him the compassion he had prayed for since his conversion...

...A solicitor in Belfast's police courts, Albert Lewis would record his more absurd experiences for later use at the family dinner table or in letters to his two sons, " Warnie" (Warren) and Jack (no one called C.S...

...The marriage of a 51 -year-old bachelor will always attract attention...

...Following Lewis' own death—on November 22, 1963, exactly a week prior to his 65th birthday—one often heard his former colleagues (ignorant of Minto) contend that his marriage was the theatrical gesture of a misogynist (probably homosexual) anxious to maintain his reputation with those who had applauded his conservative moral stance toward, among other issues, homosexuality...

...His most embarrassing volumes sprang from this delusion...

...Whatever the exact nature of the relationship might have been, it had some strange permutations...

...These emotions he termed "joy, " and considered them an intimation of the Divine...

...The devil Screwtape speaks of "the sort of woman who lives for others —you can always tell the others by their hunted expression...

...And the hard-drinking vulgarian of Oxford pubs and parties copied the paternal tendency to booze...

...Like many who were children in the 1950s, I waited with great impatience for each installment of The Chronicles of Narnia, the English writer's tales about a land of magical adventures and talking beasts...

...Nevertheless, Jack continued to act as a kind of servant to his mistress...

...Hooper, an Anglican priest-turned-Catholic, has tried to certify his picture of Lewis' spirituality by claiming a more intimate acquaintance with him than was actually the case, for they met only a few months before Lewis' death...

...Although subsequently Lewis referred to her as his " adopted mother, "he alludes to the situation as a love affair in his autobiography (without ever mentioning "Minto," as he called her, by name...

...Paul or St...

...His defenses of orthodox theology within the Church of England frequently appear in British magazines...

...Both sides have presented their own distorted portrait, replacing a complex human being with a saint...

...Albert's emotional turmoil crippled both children for life...

...Even in Wilson's charitable retelling, the ongoing warfare between high-church and evangelical Lewisites becomes the academic equivalent of the religious conflict in Northern Ireland or Lebanon...

...That explanation makes little sense, however...

...The younger son thus developed an almost Dickensian talent for caricature, along with an epigrammatic wit...

...Tolkien and Barbara Pym...

...Close friends, though, understood that everything he wrote was really autobiography, an attempt to recover the pure Wordsworthian insights of childhood...

...In the United States he is best known for exploring the lives of Christian writers as diverse as John Milton, Hilaire Belloc and, last year, Tolstoy...

...They purport to allegorize the Christian story, but can equally be interpreted as a retelling of his own interior family drama...

...Lewis by his baptismal name, Clive...

...Lewis vividly details the youngsters' annoyance with their silly parent: "'Did Shakespeare spell his name with anEattheend?' asked my brother...