A Fresh Reading

Alister McGrath’s C. S. Lewis: A Life is the first important biography of Lewis since A. N. Wilson’s C. S. Lewis: A Biography (1990). Not that there haven’t been other biographies. George Sayer revised and enlarged his 1988 biography Jack: C. S. and His Times in 1994, and Alan Jacobs published The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis in 2005. However, Sayer’s revision brought little new to light and Jacobs’ biography—while wonderfully written and immensely instructive—is primarily a biography of Lewis’ imaginative life rather than a detailed exploration of his lived experience. Wilson’s Freudian reading of Lewis’ life will always be suspect to many readers and scholars—although in fairness, Wilson’s discussions of some of Lewis’ books, notably The Discarded Image, are often perceptive and penetrating. Enter McGrath’s biography, the first fresh reading of Lewis’ life in a generation. McGrath, a prolific writer in theology and apologetics with a thorough grounding in literature and history as well, brings to the task a broadly informed understanding of Lewis and 21st-century Western culture; both perspectives serve him well as he discusses Lewis’ life and work through the lens of their potential to engage contemporary issues, especially postmodernity.

C. S. Lewis — A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet

Alister McGrath (Author)

Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.

448 pages

$4.05

Knowledgeable readers of Lewis will find much that is familiar, yet they will be fascinated by at least four “new readings” of Lewis advanced by McGrath. By far the most interesting and thoroughly documented is McGrath’s suggestion that the heretofore agreed upon date of Lewis’ conversion to Christianity, September 28, 1931—during a trip to Whipsnade Zoo—is off by as much as nine months; instead, McGrath believes the conversion may be plausibly dated June 1932. The cause of this discrepancy? Lewis’ poor memory for dates. After carefully examining Lewis’ correspondence with Arthur Greeves during this period—especially Lewis’ recounting of an important conversation with J. R. R. Tolkien—McGrath contends that Lewis may have confused two separate trips he took to Whipsnade Zoo: one with his brother, Warren, on the September date and another with Edward Foord-Kelcey in early June 1932.

McGrath suggests that Lewis may have mistakenly fused the two separate trips into one, an argument made all the more feasible when Lewis writes about his conversion in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy: “I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade 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.” That is, the “when” of Lewis’ conversion memory is linked to a trip to the zoo, not to a particular date. However, McGrath does not lean too heavily on this point, judiciously remarking:

Yet whenever Lewis’s insight is to be dated, it is to be seen as bringing to a conclusion an extended process of reflection and commitment, which proceeded in a series of stages. We cannot seize on a single moment … as defining or dating Lewis’s “conversion” to Christianity; instead, we can trace an ascending arc of reflection, of which the conversation with Tolkien represents a critical imaginative transition, and the trip to Whipsnade Zoo its logical outworking.

The second “new reading” advanced here is McGrath’s argument that Lewis and Mrs. Janie Moore—the mother of his friend, Paddy, who was killed in the trenches in France in World War I—were almost undoubtedly lovers. While other biographers have discussed this possibility—most notably Sayers and Wilson (who claims: “While nothing will ever be proved on either side, the burden of proof is on those who believe that Lewis and Mrs. Moore were not lovers”)—McGrath is the first to offer more than supposition, marshaling both circumstantial evidence and reasonable inferences in support of his contention. For instance, McGrath cites studies of the impact of World War I on British social and moral conventions: “Young men about to go to the Front were the object of sympathy for women, old and young, which often led to passionate—yet generally ephemeral—affairs.” Since we know Lewis wrote about Mrs. Moore being in his rooms at University College in 1917, McGrath says “we are perfectly entitled to wonder what [she] was doing” there. He also links Lewis’ early feelings for Mrs. Moore to his study of courtly love and his sonnet “Reason.”

The third “new reading” concerns the nature of Lewis’ academic career in Oxford from his initial appointment in 1925 as a tutor at Magdalen College until his move to Cambridge in 1955 as Professor of Medieval and Renaissance literature. Earlier biographies generally consider these years in light of Lewis’ academic achievements and popular publications, especially his books such as the Ransom Space Trilogy, The Screwtape Letters (1942), The Great Divorce (1945), Mere Christianity (1952), and the Chronicles of Narnia. McGrath also discusses these works—at times almost turning his book into a critical biography—but he also explores in some detail the discouragement Lewis experienced as an “outsider” among his Oxford colleagues. Because his popular publications made him something of a “superstar,” McGrath says Lewis was dogged by “persistent institutional hostility and rejection.” Many of Lewis’ peers faulted him for “his seeming disregard for the norms of traditional academic scholarship … [and saw this work as] placing him on the margins of academic culture, rather than at its centre.” Even after he completed his magisterial 700-page English Literature in the Sixteen Century, Excluding Drama (1954), the third volume in the Oxford History of English Language, “Lewis was seen as a spent force by many in the late 1940s and early 1950s.” In addition to his being marginalized professionally, McGrath says that the growing difficulties of living with Mrs. Moore, Warren’s alcoholism, and the gradual erosion of the meetings of the Inklings—the legendary group of writers including Lewis, Tolkien, and Charles Williams—contributed to Lewis’ growing unhappiness and sense of displacement in Oxford.

The final “new reading” McGrath provides concerns the nature of Joy Davidman’s relationship with Lewis; in short, McGrath explores the view first publicly promoted over ten years ago by Douglas Gresham that his mother went to England in 1952 with “one specific intention: ‘to seduce C. S. Lewis.’ ” McGrath notes that newly discovered Davidman papers—including a sequence of 45 love sonnets written by her to Lewis—suggest she decided to return

to England after her initial meeting with Lewis and [to forge] a closer relationship with him. Twenty-eight of these sonnets set out in great detail how Davidman attempted to forge that relationship. Lewis is represented as a glacial figure, an iceberg that Davidman intends to melt through a heady mixture of intellectual sophistication and physical allure.

Because these new papers were only becoming available as McGrath’s biography was being completed, additional biographical and scholarly work will harvest more fascinating material on this matter.[1]

As good as McGrath’s biography is, it is not—as its publisher claims—the “definitive” Lewis biography. Indeed, for someone as complex, prolific, and controversial as Lewis, only a future, multivolume biography will approach being definitive. A case in point is Lewis’ huge correspondence, in the range of ten to fourteen thousand letters. Whoever writes Lewis’ “definitive” biography must integrate this correspondence into the story of his life. And while McGrath makes liberal use of this correspondence—now available thanks to the monumental efforts of Walter Hooper—it remains for someone else to mine the depths of Lewis’ letters and to show how they evidence the varying aspects of his lived experience. For instance, each of the issues raised in the previous paragraphs needs to be explored in much greater detail—something only possible in a multivolume biography.

C. S. Lewis: A Life is eminently readable, in part because of its easily accessible prose and McGrath’s stylistic decision to employ the use of questions as a heuristic. Two examples must suffice. Early in the biography, regarding Lewis’ search for joy, McGrath writes: “What does Lewis mean by Sehnsucht? … Lewis was probing and questioning the limits of his world. What lay beyond its horizons? Yet Lewis could not answer the questions that these longings so provocatively raised in his youthful mind. To what did they point? Was there a doorway? And if so, where was it to be found? And what did it lead to?” Later when he writes about Narnia, McGrath asks: “So how did Lewis invent this imaginative world? And why? Was it a retreat into the security of his childhood at a time of personal and professional stress? Was Lewis like Peter Pan, an emotionally retarded boy who never really grew up, and Narnia his version of ‘Never Never Land’? ” Sometimes McGrath goes on to posit possible answers, while other times he does not. This is an effective rhetorical strategy; the questions engage the reader’s mind and keep him or her anticipating the next page in the story that McGrath is telling.

McGrath’s biography of the most important Christian author of the 20th century is certainly worthy of its subject. Readers will find much to admire in the book, and its publication fifty years after Lewis’ death gives witness to his enduring legacy, one that C. S. Lewis: A Life will help to sustain.

Don W. King, professor of English at Montreat College, is the editor of Christian Scholar’s Review. He edited the collection of Joy Davidman’s letters, Out of My Bone, published by Eerdmans in 2009.

1. For instance, see my essay “A Naked Tree: The Love Sonnets of Joy Davidman to C. S. Lewis,” SEVEN: An Anglo-American Literary Review, Vol. 29 (2012).