The Surprising C.S. Lewis

If you know one thing about C.S. Lewis, it's probably that he wrote The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. That a confirmed bachelor and Oxford academic should suddenly turn to writing fairy tales in his 50s is a big surprise. But only on the face of it. The more you get to know about Clive Staples Lewis, the more you realise that his life and work are full of surprises.

The first surprise is that he was Irish and always viewed Belfast as "home" (he was born there in 1898), even though he lived most of his life in England and gave the impression of being the archetypally tweedy, pipe-smoking Englishman. (He died in 1963, on the same day Kennedy was assassinated.)

The second surprise is that his childhood was extremely unhappy. This is a surprise because his adult writings have joy--that "unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction"--as their principal theme. His mother died when he was nine, and he was then sent to a school run by a Dickensian madman, a ranting headmaster who flogged his pupils with relish, and was later certified insane.

A third surprise is that Lewis was a soldier as well as a bookworm. He volunteered for service during the First World War and was mentioned in despatches. When a British shell fell short, killing the man next to him, he was sent home, shrapnel embedded in his body, and remained hospitalised until the end of hostilities. Despite undergoing all this trauma before he was 20, he proceeded to take a triple First in Classics and English from Oxford University and established himself there as a tutor and lecturer by the time he was 27, one of his first pupils being England's future Poet Laureate, John Betjeman.

A fourth surprise is that his confirmed bachelorhood suddenly evaporated in 1956 when he married the divorced, ex-Communist, Jewish Christian American poet, Joy Davidman. This from a self-described dinosaur who claimed he positively liked monotony! The story of their marriage and Lewis's bereavement is the subject of Richard Attenborough's film Shadowlands , starring Anthony Hopkins. Lewis wrote about the loss of his wife to cancer in the shatteringly honest A Grief Observed. But the suggestions from some quarters (based mostly on the film) that he lost his faith at this time are not true. At the time of his death, he was working on a mature and reflective book about prayer, published posthumously as Letters to Malcolm.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in Lewis's life was that he converted to Christianity in the first place. After the death of his mother and his experiences in the trenches it was not an inevitable move to make. His embracing of faith forms the subject of his autobiography Surprised by Joy, and provides the hinge about which his whole life turned. In his teens he had became an atheist, rejecting the artificial and largely nominal Christianity he had been brought up with. And that atheism lies behind his first published work, a volume of poetry which appeared in 1919. But Christian friends gradually convinced him that theism made sense. By 1931 everything had changed, and the last step in his conversion happened as he was being driven to Whipsnade Zoo one sunny morning. "When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did." This change is a key to understanding Lewis's works, for all his non-professional writings after his conversion either account for it (in autobiography), or dramatise it (in various forms of fiction), or explicate it (in apologetic works such as The Problem of Pain, The Four Loves and Miracles).

As a poet at heart, Lewis brings to all these works a gift for putting the best words in the best order. He knows how to argue something logically, yet he can also speak to the heart, putting complex ideas simply and choosing lucid and illuminating metaphors to get his point across. He once wrote that "Any fool can write learned language. The vernacular is the real test. If you can't turn your faith into it, then either you don't understand it or you don't believe it."

Perhaps the best example of Lewis's gift for popular communication is Mere Christianity. This book began life as a series of 15-minute radio broadcasts he gave during the Second World War. It both argues for the truth of Christianity and tries to show how Christian faith works out in practice. A particular strength of the book is that it avoids denominational questions and tries to present Christianity in such a way that all Christians can agree on it. To this end, Lewis sent the manuscript to four friends, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, an Anglican and a Roman Catholic for "vetting". All approved it and the result was a Christian classic which has been phenomenally popular the world over, but especially in the United States.

Whether Lewis's distrust of denominationalism stems from his Ulster upbringing or not, it is hard to say, but Lewis both was and remains accessible to all strands of the Christian tradition. The Catholic (Lord) David Alton devoted a chapter to Lewis's prophetic qualities in his book Signs of Contradiction . At least one pope is said to have kept a volume of CS Lewis by his bedside. The former Lord Chancellor Hailsham (like Lewis, an Anglican) based his Values: Collapse and Cure on Lewis's brilliant little work of philosophy, The Abolition of Man. The Orthodox Bishop of Diokleia, Kallistos Ware, has tried, in a friendly way, to "steal" Lewis for his own tradition, in his article, "Lewis, the Anonymous Orthodox". And the chairman of the Oxford Theology Faculty, Dr Paul Fiddes, a Baptist, has written on Lewis's success as a myth-maker. The breadth of Lewis's appeal would not be seen by him as a "lowest common denominator" kind of appeal, but as an indication that Christians from different camps have more in common than they have at variance--and more also than they sometimes think.

Lewis's fiction is as varied as the audience for his apologetics. He wrote a science-fiction trilogy, and six more fairy tales after The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (together, the seven fairy tales comprise the best-selling Chronicles of Narnia ). But what he considered to be his finest work, Till We Have Faces, is comparatively unknown. This is a very unusual story, a retelling of the Cupid and Psyche myth, and often puts off readers who have come to it straight from Narnia. But it is a profound insight into the nature of envy and ugliness, and rewards (indeed, really requires) re-readings. To get the most out of it, one needs to approach it as a novel, not as an allegory.

But perhaps the best place for an adult to start on Lewis's fiction is with The Screwtape Letters. This book (dedicated to Lewis's great friend, JRR Tolkien) purports to be the correspondence between a senior and a junior devil, giving all the psychology of temptation, not from the human, but from the tempters' point of view. (Tolkien wasn't hugely chuffed to be the dedicatee.) It's a hilarious satire on moral confusion and is most enjoyably read in small chunks. One of the unnerving things about the book is the importance Lewis attaches to peccadilloes. As Screwtape, the senior devil, writes: "It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts." Lewis stated that he had no intention of explaining how the correspondence fell into his hands. He also said he never wrote anything more easily than The Screwtape Letters , and the fluency of the invention shows on every page. It was such a hit when it first came out in the 1940s that Lewis got his face on the cover of Time magazine--unprecedented for an Oxford don.

Lewis had the opposite of writer's block. He was an "always writer". He once told a colleague, "Sometimes when I get home at night I tell myself I'm too tired to write. But I always do." His tremendous facility with words shows itself with particular force and vigour in the occasional pieces he wrote for newspapers and journals, or in the sermons or essays he was sometimes commissioned to produce, recently gathered together in C.S. Lewis: Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces. Indeed, one might say that in a sermon such as "The Weight of Glory", Lewis has written a manifesto of his central preoccupation as a writer and a Christian. It deals again with "joy", the pang, the stab, the longing for beauty and purity and heaven which he identifies as the secret signature of each soul.

The first man to use the F-word on British television, Kenneth Tynan, the theatre critic and Olivier's right-hand man at the National Theatre, was a pupil of Lewis's at Oxford. During his final illness Tynan turned to Lewis's works and was so struck by "The Weight of Glory" that he requested part of it to be read at his funeral. It is a suitable summary of Lewis's chief concern both in life and in art:

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things--the beauty, the memory of our own past--are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited. Do you think I am trying to weave a spell? Perhaps I am; but remember your fairy tales. Spells are used for breaking enchantments as well as for inducing them.
Like other great English Christian writers before him, such as Herbert, Bunyan and Chesterton, Lewis was motivated to weave spells that would break the enchantment of human self-sufficiency and materialism. His own fairy tales weave particularly powerful spells of that kind. And in this light it is hardly surprising (indeed, it is highly befitting) that his first such tale, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe , should be his best-known memorial.

Michael Ward was for several years the curator of CS Lewis's home, "The Kilns", and President of the Oxford CS Lewis Society. He has lectured on CS Lewis in the UK, the US, and Scandinavia, and tutored students of Lewis at Oxford University, Stanford University, and other institutions of higher education.