C.S.Lewis: A Biography (Flamingo) (Paperback)

The book's great sensation is the assertion that the young Lewis, at around age 20, had an affair with Mrs. Jane Moore, the woman whom he "adopted" as a mother figure for the rest of his life. The theory, borrowed without acknowledgement from the eccentric American Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog (whom Wilson repays with unfair derision), lacks both plausibility and evidence. Lewis had lost his mother at a young age and had chafed under his father's well-meant but wrong-headed tutelage. Mrs. Moore's son, for a while Lewis' closest friend, had died in the Great War. That the two should have formed a substitute family is not at all surprising. Wilson offers no grounds for supposing that the relationship was sexual. Instead, he offers "evidence" of this sort: Lewis' diaries use the Greek letter delta (our "D") as shorthand for Mrs. Moore. Of the many Greek words and names beginning with that letter, he singles out "Diotimia", from whom the Socrates of Plato's "Symposium" is supposed to have learned his theories about eros. That is just a wild guess, evidently made without knowledge of the fact that delta is the first letter of the Greek transliteration of "Jane". (Our "j" sound is not native to the Greek language but can be represented by the diphthong delta-zeta.)

Wilson's major weakness as a biographer is... his incurious, intellectually lazy approach to a field already tilled by many predecessors. A life that looked at Lewis from a different angle, that, for instance, probed his pre-Christian philosophical opinions and asked to what extent they truly changed as a result of his conversion or that placed his apologetics next to the works (Wells, Huxley, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin et al.) against which he was reacting or that gave adequate attention to his professional literary interests, could have been a fresh and vivid portrait. One that accepts prior interpretations with a few unflattering twists is not.

There is no point in writing a biography simply in order to say what has been said before - not even if one says it with slightly more elegance and now and then taxes the subject for his failure to anticipate politically correct points of view. As a compendium of bare facts, sprinkled with factoids, Wilson's book is acceptable, but it is hard to imagine a reason for anybody to seek it out.

To me it seems that Wilson's best remarks are made when he is in literary-critical mode. I can actually recognise Lewis's book 'The Allegory of Love' from the description given. However, Wilson's fatal habit cannot help but ruin it by the addition of a florid Freudian excursus at the end. Against this slight virtue, the Lewis I know from his autobiography, diaries, and other biographies appears as a caricature.

George Sayer wrote a biography of Lewis entitled 'Jack': he was a pupil of Lewis, and a good friend. As this friendship lasted twenty-nine years, he was a hundred times more qualified than Wilson to write a biography. Sayer was so stung by the unfairness of Wilson's book that he responded with an updated introduction to his own biography. Although Sayer does not baulk at concluding that the pre-Christian Lewis and Mrs Moore were indeed lovers, he does defend him against Wilson calumnies in foursquare style. As a Christian Lewis was not known to drink heavily; he did not encourage others to drink too much; Wilson does not have taped testimony from Douglas Gresham about Lewis's bedroom behaviour with Joy Davidman, etc. In short, if the Christian Lewis (he converted around the age of thirty) were half as bad as Wilson makes out, his reputation would have been poor long before this biographer set poison pen to paper. Insinuation and semi-attributable quotation is hard to refute simply. But then strong claims require strong proof, and he simply fails to produce it.

For myself I will rest content with refuting four errors on the first page of Wilson's preface. He says that the Narnia books are in a 'rough hewn style'. I think he is the first to discover this in fifty years - is there a rough-hewn chapter or page in them? He says that Lewis 'did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people'. I suppose JRR Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), John Betjeman (Poet Laureate), Sir Peter Medawar (Nobel prize, biology), and Billy Graham, are not meant to count. He says that Lewis was 'deliberately at variance with the twentieth century'. But if he could only make a case that Lewis would have actually agreed with lies, sexual immorality, injustice, subjectivism, Marxism, and liberal theology in any other century this might be a point worth making. Finally, he says that 'religions have collapsed' in the twentieth century. He fails to notice the rise of the modern 'supermarket' approach to spiritual things - Feng Shui, Star Wars, the Pentecostal/charismatic movement, house churches, 'New Age' paganism, the Bahai faith, and the many cults that pop up like mushrooms. Far from dying out, it's a free-market 'pick your own' situation now. He should exit left pursued by a bear.