Preface
Who is C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)? For many, probably most, Lewis is the creator of the fabulous world of Narnia, the author of some of the best-known and most discussed children’s books of the twentieth century, which continue to attract enthusiastic readers and sell in the millions. Fifty years after his death, Lewis remains one of the most influential popular writers of our age. Alongside his equally famous Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien (1892–1973), author of The Lord of the Rings, Lewis is widely seen as a literary and cultural landmark. The worlds of literature and cinema have been deeply shaped by both of these Oxford authors. Yet without Lewis, The Lord of the Rings might never have been written. Lewis may have created his own bestsellers, but he was also midwife to Tolkien’s masterpiece, even proposing Tolkien for the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature on the basis of this epic work. For these reasons alone, the story of C. S. Lewis is worth telling.
But there is far more to C. S. Lewis than this. As Lewis’s long-term friend Owen Barfield (1898–1997) once remarked, there were really three C. S. Lewises. Alongside Lewis the author of bestselling novels, there is a second, less well-known persona: Lewis the Christian writer and apologist, concerned to communicate and share his rich vision of the intellectual and imaginative power of the Christian faith—a faith he discovered in the middle of his life and found rationally and spiritually compelling. Much to the annoyance of some, his Mere Christianity is now often cited as the most influential religious work of the twentieth century.
Perhaps on account of his very public commitment to Christianity, Lewis remains a controversial figure, who elicits affection and admiration from some of those who share his delight in the Christian faith, and ridicule and contempt from some of those who do not. Yet whether one thinks Christianity is good or bad, it is clearly important—and Lewis is perhaps the most credible and influential popular representative of the “mere Christianity” that he himself championed.
Yet there is a third aspect to Lewis, perhaps the least familiar to most of his admirers and critics: the distinguished Oxford don and literary critic who packed lecture theatres with his unscripted reflections on English literature, and who went on to become the first occupant of the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge. Few might now read his Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942); in its day, however, it set a new standard through its clarity and insight.
Lewis’s professional calling was to the “groves of Academe.” His election as a fellow of the British Academy in July 1955 was a public demonstration of his high scholarly repute. Yet some in the academic world regarded his commercial and popular success as being inconsistent with any claim on his part to be a serious scholar. From 1942 onwards, Lewis struggled to maintain his academic credibility in the light of his more popular works, above all his lighthearted musings on the diabolical world of Screwtape.
So how do these three Lewises relate to each other? Are they separate compartments of his life, or are they somehow interconnected? And how did they each develop? This book aims to tell the story of the shaping and expressing of Lewis’s mind, focussing on his writings. It is not concerned with documenting every aspect of Lewis’s life, but with exploring the complex and fascinating connections between Lewis’s external and internal worlds. This biography is thus organised around the real and imaginary worlds that Lewis inhabited—primarily Oxford, Cambridge, and Narnia. How does the development of his ideas and his imagination map onto the physical worlds he inhabited? Who helped him craft his intellectual and imaginative vision of reality?
In our discussion, we shall consider Lewis’s rise to fame, and some of the factors that lay behind this. Yet it is one thing for Lewis to have become famous; it is another for him to remain so fifty years after his death. Many commentators back in the 1960s believed that Lewis’s fame was transitory. His inevitable decline into obscurity, many then believed, was just a matter of time—a decade at most. It is for this reason that the final chapter of this work tries to explain, not simply why Lewis became such a figure of authority and influence, but why he remains so today.
Some of the more important early biographies were written by those who knew Lewis personally. These continue to be invaluable as descriptions of what Lewis was like as a human being, as well as offering some important judgements concerning his character. However, the vast scholarly endeavours of the last two decades have clarified questions of historical importance (such as Lewis’s role in the Great War), explored aspects of Lewis’s intellectual development, and provided critical readings of his major works. This biography tries to weave these strands together, presenting an understanding of Lewis firmly grounded in earlier studies, yet able to go beyond them.
Any attempt to deal with Lewis’s rise to prominence has to acknowledge his misgivings about assuming a public role. Lewis was indeed a prophet to his own day and age, and beyond; yet it must be said that he was a reluctant prophet. Even his own conversion seemed to take place against his better judgement; and having been converted to Christianity, Lewis spoke out on its themes largely because of the silence or unintelligibility of those he believed were better placed than he was to engage religious and theological questions publicly.
Lewis also comes across as something of an eccentric, in the proper sense of that term—someone who departs from recognised, conventional, or established norms or patterns, or who is displaced from the centre of things. His curious relationship with Mrs. Moore, to be discussed in some detail in this work, placed him well outside the British social norms of the 1920s. Many of Lewis’s academic colleagues at Oxford came to regard him as an outsider from about 1940, both on account of his openly Christian views and his unscholarly habit of writing popular works of fiction and apologetics. Lewis famously described his distance from the prevailing academic trends of his day when he referred to himself as a “dinosaur” in his inaugural lecture at Cambridge University in 1954.
This sense of distance from the centre is also evident in Lewis’s religious life. Although Lewis became a highly influential voice within British Christianity, he operated from its margins rather than its centre, and had no time for the cultivation of relationships with leading figures of the religious establishment. It was perhaps this trait that endeared him to some in the media, anxious to find an authentic religious voice outside the power structures of the mainstream churches.
This biography sets out, not to praise Lewis or condemn him, but to understand him—above all, his ideas, and how these found expression in his writings. This task has been made easier by the publication of virtually all that is known to remain of Lewis’s writings, as well as a significant body of critical scholarly literature dealing with his works and ideas.
The vast amount of biographical and scholarly material now available concerning Lewis and his circle threatens to overwhelm the reader with fine detail. Those trying to make sense of Lewis find themselves bombarded with what the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950) called “a meteoric shower of facts,” raining from the sky.[1] How, she asked, might these be combined to disclose meaning, rather than remaining a mere accumulation of information? This biography adds to what is known about Lewis’s life, while also trying to make sense of it. How are these facts to be woven together, so that they may disclose a pattern? This biography of Lewis is not another rehearsal of the vast army of facts and figures concerning his life, but an attempt to identify its deeper themes and concerns, and assess its significance. This is not a work of synopsis, but of analysis.
The publication of the collected letters of C. S. Lewis, carefully annotated and cross-referenced by Walter Hooper during the period 2000–2006, is of landmark importance for Lewis studies. These letters, taking up some 3,500 pages of text, offer insights into Lewis that were simply not available to an earlier generation of Lewis biographers. Perhaps most important, they provide a continuous narrative backbone for an account of Lewis’s life. For this reason, these letters are cited more than any other source throughout this biography. As will become clear, a close reading of these letters forces review and possibly revision of some widely accepted dates in Lewis’s life.
This is a critical biography, which examines the evidence for existing assumptions and approaches, and corrects them where necessary. In most cases, this can be done simply and subtly, and I have seen no reason to draw attention to those corrections. On the other hand, it is only fair to tell readers from the outset that this wearying yet necessary process of checking everything against documentary evidence has led me to one conclusion in particular that pits me, not simply against every Lewis scholar I know, but against Lewis himself. I refer to the date of his “conversion” or recovery of belief in God, which Lewis himself, in his book Surprised by Joy (1955), locates in “Trinity Term 1929” (that is, at some point between 28 April and 22 June 1929).[2]
This date is faithfully repeated in every major study of Lewis to have appeared recently. Yet my close reading of the documentary material points unequivocally to a later date, possibly as early as March 1930, but more likely in the Trinity Term of that year. On this point, I stand entirely alone in Lewis scholarship, and the reader has a right to know that I am completely isolated on this question.
From what has been said already, it will be clear that there is no need to justify a new biography of Lewis to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1963. Yet perhaps there is a need to offer a small defence of myself as his biographer. Unlike his earlier biographers—such as his longtime friends George Sayer (1914–2005) and Roger Lancelyn Green (1918–1987)—I never knew Lewis personally. He was someone I discovered through his writings in my early twenties, a decade after his death, and who, over a period of twenty years, gradually came to win my respect and admiration, though mingled with continuing curiosity and abiding concerns. I have no illuminating memories, no privileged disclosures, and no private documents on which to draw. Every resource used in this biography is either already in the public domain or available to public scrutiny and inspection.
This is a book written by someone who discovered Lewis through his writings, for others who have come to know Lewis in the same way. The Lewis I have come to know is mediated through his words, not through any personal acquaintance. Where other biographers refer to Lewis as “Jack” in their works, I have felt it right to call him “Lewis” throughout, mainly to emphasise my personal and critical distance from him. I believe that this is the Lewis whom he himself would wish future generations to know.
Why so? As Lewis emphasised throughout the 1930s, the important thing about authors is the texts that they write. What really matters is what those texts themselves say. Authors should not themselves be a “spectacle”; they are rather the “set of spectacles” through which we as readers see ourselves, the world, and the greater scheme of things of which we are a part. Lewis thus had surprisingly little interest in the personal history of the great English poet John Milton (1608–1674), or the political and social context within which he wrote. What really mattered were Milton’s writings—his ideas. The way Lewis believed we should approach Milton must be allowed to shape the way we in turn approach Lewis. Throughout this work, wherever possible, I have tried to engage with his writings, exploring what they say, and assessing their significance.
Though I did not know Lewis as a person, I can relate well—perhaps better than most—to at least some aspects of Lewis’s worlds. Like Lewis, I spent my childhood in Ireland, mainly in Downpatrick, the county town of County Down, whose “long, soft hills” Lewis knew and loved, and described so beautifully. I have walked where he walked, paused where he paused, and marvelled where he marvelled. I, too, felt that twinge of yearning at seeing the distant blue Mountains of Mourne from my childhood home. Like Lewis’s mother, Flora, I also was a pupil at the Methodist College, Belfast.
I also know Lewis’s Oxford well, having been a student there for seven years, before—after a brief spell at Lewis’s other university, Cambridge—returning to teach and write there for twenty-five years, ending up as Oxford University’s chair in historical theology, as well as becoming what Oxford calls a “Head of House.” Like Lewis, I was an atheist as a younger man, before discovering the intellectual riches of the Christian faith. Like Lewis, I chose to express and enact that faith in the specific form found in the Church of England. And finally, as someone who is often called upon to offer a public defence of the Christian faith against its critics, I find myself both appreciating and using Lewis’s ideas and approaches, many—but not all—of which seem to me to retain at least something of their sparkle and power.
Finally, a word about the method used in writing this biography. The core research began with a close reading of Lewis’s entire published output (including his letters) in strictly chronological order of writing, so that the development of his thought and writing style could be appreciated. The Pilgrim’s Regress was thus assigned to August 1932, when it was written, rather than May 1933, when it was published. This process of intense engagement with primary sources, which took fifteen months, was followed by a reading—in some cases a somewhat critical rereading—of the substantial secondary literature concerning Lewis, his circle of friends, and the intellectual and cultural context in which they lived, thought, and wrote. Finally, I examined unpublished archive material, much of which is held in Oxford, which casts further light on the shaping of Lewis’s mind and on the intellectual and institutional context within which he worked.
It became clear at an early stage that a more academic study would be necessary to engage some of the scholarly questions that emerged from this detailed research. This biography avoids such details of scholarly engagement; notes and bibliography have been kept to the bare minimum. My concern in this volume is to tell a story, not to settle occasionally arcane and invariably detailed academic debates. Readers may, however, like to know that a more academic volume will be published shortly, offering scholarly exploration and justification of some of the assertions and conclusions of this biography.[3]
But enough of apologies and preliminaries. Our story begins in a world of long ago and far away—the Irish city of Belfast in the 1890s.
Alister E. McGrath
LONDON