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C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963) |
British literary critic, scholar and author, known for his classic fantasy stories for children, The Chronicles of Narnia (1950-1956). Its has been said that without C.S. Lewis, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings might never have been written. After a spiritual search Lewis became one of the most popular spokesmen for Christianity, known as the "Apostle to the Skeptics." Lewis was a fellow of the British Academy but his commercial and popular success somewhat undermined his reputation in the academic world. "Listen, Peter, When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been here and always will be here: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream." (The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis, illustrated by Pauline Baynes, Collins, 1989, pp. 159-160; originally published in 1956) Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, the son of Albert James Lewis, a solicitor, and Florence Augusta (née Hamilton), the daughter of a Church of Ireland priest. Lewis was very close to his mother, who taught him to love books and encouraged him to study French and Latin. When he was six, the family moved into a house in the Strandtown area of East Belfast. During his childhood, Lewis created the imaginary country of Bloxen. In the attic of the house he had a "study" where learned and first practiced the craft of writing. Many of these tales were later published in Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C. S. Lewis (1985). Lewis mother, a promising mathematician, died of cancer when he was
nine years old. In 1908 he was sent to the Wynyard School in Watford,
Hertfordshire, which he later on called "Belsea". Its headmaster was
committed to an insane asylum. Lewis once recalled his education at
Wynyard as the forced feeding of a "jungle of dates, battles, exports,
imports, and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly
useless had they been remembered." (Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955, p. 34) After attending Campbell College in
the
east of Belfast, where he developed a serious respiratory illness, and
abandoning his Christian faith at the Malvern College,
he was educated privatedly in Great Bookham, Surrey. Like many other
students, he witnessed a number of homosexual relationships, but which
he himself rejected. Most of his life, Lewis was unmarried. "I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs
indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of
gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles.
Also of endless books," Lewis wrote in Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life.
"There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the
cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books
in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic,
books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents'
interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child
and books most empathically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the
seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the
shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new
to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of
grass." (Ibid., p. 10) Lewis's early favorites were Edith Nesbit's books, among them The Story of the Amulet (1906), which mixed fantasy with reality, and the uncut edition of Gulliver's Travels. Later he read the Norse myths and sagas, and such historical books as Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and Lew Wallace's Ben Hur. He also found The Odyssey, Voltaire, Milton and Spenser. Lewis's private tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, taught him to read Greek for pleasure. In 1916, Lewis won a scholarship to University College, Oxfird. While in Keble Kollege, where Lewis had joined a cadet battalion, he met Mrs Janie King Moore, a much older woman – she was 45 at that time and had separated from her husband. Mrs Moore was the mother of Edward Francis Courtenay ("Paddy") Moore, with whom Lewis shared rooms and who was killed in combat. From
1917 to 1919 Lewis served in the Somerset Light Infantry, a combat
regiment which had been stationed in France since the beginning of the
Great War. On the battlefields of France Lewis witnessed the horrors of
trench
warfare, but in his later writings he did not speak much of his
experiences at the front. To calm his nerves under shell fire, he read
voraciously and wrote
poems. Spirits in Bondage (1919) includes a group of poems which touch
the realities of war, such as 'French Nocturne (Monchy-Le-Preux):'
"Long leagues on either hand the trenches spread / And all is still;
now even this gross line / Drinks in the frosty silences divine / The
pale, green moon is riding overhead." In February 1918, Lewis was hospitalized for "trench fever," a
disease spread by body lice. During the Battle of Arras, Lewis was wounded in the back by a German shell. The wound was not life threatening but he was sent back to England. While convalescing at the Endsleigh Palace Hospital for Officers, originally a London hotel, he met again Mrs Moore, who followed him to Oxford with her daughter Maureen. However, Lewis concealed this from his father. In 1930 he moved into "The Kilns," a house on the outskirts of Oxford. A number of children found shelter and safety at the Kilns during WWII. Mrs Moore died in January 1951, at the age of seventynine. In her later years she suffered from dementia and was moved into a nursing home. Lewis graduated in 1923 from University College, Oxford, where became a fellow and tutor in English literature at Magdalen College, holding the post nearly thirty years. For short periods he served as a lecturer at the University of Wales, the University of Durham, and other places. Lewis disliked traveling but he spent hours each week responding to letters he received from all over the world. His lectures were crowded – he had a phenomenal memory, and he could speak spontaneously about Greek and Latin texts without notes. A visitor at the Socratic Society of Oxford portrayed Lewis as "ruddy of complexion, radiating health, of substantial girth all over, and his eyes sparkled with mirth." (Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual Legacy of C.S. Lewis by Terry W. Glaspey, Cumberland House, 1996, p. 50) Between 1954 and 1963 Lewis was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge, remaining there until his death. With J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis formed a literary group called "The Inklings," which took shape in the 1930s. The group, all male, met typically in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College on Thursday evenings. Eventually their Tuesday lunchtime sessions at the smoky Bird and Baby pub became a part of Oxford social life. Tolkien himself was a Roman Catholic and he was never quite happy with Lewis's embracing of the Anglican Church. Williams died in 1945 and the meetings faded away in 1949. Acknowledging Tolkien's literary achievement with his The Lord of the Rings trilogy Lewis even proposed him for the 1961 Nobel Prize for Literature. Among other members of the club were Christopher Tolkien and Owen Barfield. Lewis preferred the company of men, but his literary friendships also included women authors such as Katharine Farrer, Ruth Pitter, Sister Penelope, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Lewis considered that women's minds were intrinsically inferior to men's. As Surprised by Joy demonstrates, the watershed in Lewis's life was his conversion from atheism to Christianity. He had began to lose his faith at the age of 13, partly due to his deep-rooted pessimism, and partly due to pantheistic experiences and interest in Wagner's music. After reading such writers as Chesterfield, Bergson, George MacDonald, and George Herbert, and abandoning his youthful snobbery, he became a deist in 1929, and later he was associated with such neo-Christians as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien; some other teachers at Oxford also influenced him. In the 1930s Lewis started to publish popular religious books, including The Pilgrim's Regress
(1933), a thinly disguised allegory of his own conversion, which he
wrote in Ireland in two weeks. Lewis's reputation as
a prominent Christian writer and radio personality strained his
relationship with Mrs Moore, who declared herself an atheist later in
life. During World War II Lewis produced the books that would earn him international fame. The Problem of Pain (1940), written at the suggestion of the publisher Ashley Sampson, was dedicated to the Inklings. Lewis attempted to answer the question: "If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both." (Ibid., Collins, twenty-fourth impression, 1984, p. 14) Lewis suggested that much of the suffering in God's world can be traced to the evil choices people make. "Its is men, not God, who have produced racks, whips, prisons, slavery, guns, bayonets, and bombs; its is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork." (Ibid., p. 77) The Screwtape Letters (1942),
dedicated to J. R. R. Tokien, was a correspondence from a senior devil
to his nephew concerning the latter's task of winning a young man to
damnation. This book has remained one of Lewis's most popular and translated works. "How much better for us if all
humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who
lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the
dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence,
and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of
a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! And
how disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death which war
enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered
useless. In wartime not even a human can believe that he is going to
live forever." (Ibid., Geoffrey Bles: The Centenary Press. 1945, p. 32) In his
own life, Lewis followed Christian principles. He gave away two-thirds
of his income, sat at the bedside of the sick, and personally served
the poor. Elizabeth Anscombe humiliated Lewis in a debate at the
meeting of the Socratic club at Oxford in February 1948. Anscombe
destroyed his arguments against naturalism, presented in Miracles: A Preliminary Study
(1947). Lewis believed that miracles are possible, that God has
sometimes perfiormed them but most stories about miraculous events are
probably false. "His appearance to Ezekiel is attended with imagery
that does not borrow from Nature, but (it is a mystery too seldom
noticed) from those machines which men were to make centuries after
Ezekiel's death. The prophet saw something suspiciously like a dynamo." (Ibid., p. 139) Lewis's literary criticism opposed classical, traditional, and purely literary values in favour of the biographical, psychological, and impressionistic. However, it took a long period before he began to appreciate modern poetry. Lewis was the chief spokesman for the view that a good reader receives the text, it affects one's senses, but the bad reader "uses" it – the text relieves one's life but does not add to it. Among Lewis's most substantial books is English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (1954). As an essayist Lewis did not avoid controversial issues. In 'The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment' he questioned the idea that to seek to "cure" a criminal is nobler than to rely on punishment. Islam he described as "a Christian heresy." In Out of Silent Planet (1938) Lewis put his Christian
beliefs in the setting of a science fiction narrative. With this volume
Lewis started the Ransom trilogy, where the achievements of science and
the forces of progress are threat to the world. In the first part
Ransom is
kidnapped by an amoral Wellsian scientist, Weston, and taken to Mars.
The series continued in Perelandra (1943), in which an angel carries Ransom to Venus. Ransom is back on Earth in That Hideous Strenght (1945),
and calls Merlin to fight against an
unpleasant scientific organization, the N.I.C.E., the National
Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. Lewis said in letter Roger
Lancelyn Green, that what spurred him to write the work, was Olaf
Stapledon's Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds and Other Essays (1927). The Chronicles of Narnia has turned out to be the most
lasting of Lewis's novels. "I wrote the books I should have liked to
read," Lewis said. "That's always been my reason for writing." The Chroniclestell
the story of a group of children, who come into contact with the
mysterious other world of Narnia, where the lion Aslan is the prototype
of Christ. "I think I had been having a good many dreams of lions about
that time. Apart from that, I don't know where the Lion came from or
why He came,"
Lewis explained later. "But once He was there He pulled the whole story
together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after
Him." (quoted in Inside Narnia: A Guide to Exploring The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by Devin Brown, Baker Books, 2005p. 108) The portal to Narnia, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise,
is a wardrobe through which the four sibling children, Peter, Susan,
Edmund, and Lucy enter a secondary world. In the first story the bad
Witch is destroyed in a battle. The sequels follow the childrens travels in
Narnia, where they meet sea monsters, dragons, mermaids, wizards and other
creatures. Turbaned, dark-skinned people called Calormenes, who worship
a demon named Tash, also cause trouble – Lewis's view of Muslims
couldn't be more explicit. The final books deal with Narnia's beginning and end. In the last Armageddon story, with its death-and-resurrection theme, the struggle is between young King Tirian and the forces of evil, as represented by Shift the Ape and Puzzle the donkey. The harmony of Narnia is destroyed and Father Time puts out the sun. Jill and Eustache appear from a railway train to help young Tirian, "last Kings of Narnia." Aslan reveals the truth: the children were killed in a railway accident. "Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning." (The Last Battle, p. 171) Lewis finishes the book telling that they lived happily ever after – it was for them only the beginning of the real story. Lewis was briefly married to Helen Joy Davidman, a Jewish American
poet, a former Communist, who had two children. They met in 1952, but
their correspondence had started before it. Lewis's years at Cambridge
were happy – Joy Davidman was always good-humoured and shared his
delight in argument for argument's sake. She died of cancer in 1960.
Lewis keep the marriage secret from Tolkien, which caused tension in
their friendship. Lewis's notes from this period was published under
the title A Grief Observed (1961). The relationship was the subject of the film Shadowlands (1994), directed by William Nicholson and starring Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins. Shadowlands
was based on Nicholson's television script from 1985 and a successful
stage play. Lewis died of osteoporosis on November 22, 1963, the day
when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Though Lewis returned to Ireland for his annual vacation almost every year of his life and his language echoed his origins, his stature in the Irish literary pantheon has remained marginal. In 1988 Kathryn Lindskoog published a study (The C.S. Lewis Hoax) in which she questioned the authenticity of a number of Lewis's works published from 1966 to 1991, among them The Dark Tower (1977). Lindskoog continued the debate in Light in the Shadowlands (2001), claiming that the author's posthumous books are at least partly spurious. For further reading: C.S. Lewis: A Biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper (1974); The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter (1978); Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, by Brian Sibley (1985); C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by J. Beverluis (1985); Clive Staples Lewis by W. Griffin (1986); The C.S. Lewis Hoax by Kathryn Lindskoog (1988); C.S. Lewis: A Biography by A.N. Wilson (1990); The Fiction of C.S. Lewis by K. Filmer (1993); The Chronicle of Narnia by C.N. Manlove (1993); The Man Who Created Narnia by M. Coren (1996); C.S. Lewis: Christian and Storyteller by B. Gromley (1998); Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands by Kathryn Lindskoog (2001); C.S. Lewis, My Godfather: Letters, Photos, and Recollections by Laurence Harwood (2007); Companionship in Grief: Love and Loss in the Memoirs of C.S. Lewis, John Bayley, Donald Hall, Joan Didion, and Calvin Trillin by Jeffrey Berman (2010); C. S. Lewis - A Life: Eccentric Genius, Reluctant Prophet by Alister McGrath (2013); The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams by Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski (2015); Contemporary Perspectives on C.S. Lewis' The Abolition of Man: History, Philosophy, Education, and Science, edited by Tim Mosteller and Gayne Anacker (2017); Becoming C. S. Lewis (1898–1918): A Biography of Young Jack Lewis by Harry Lee Poe (2019); Cambridge Companion to C.S. Lewis, edited by Robert MacSwain and Michael Ward (2020); Making of C.S. Lewis: From Atheist to Apologist (1918-1945) by Harry Lee Poe (2021); The Completion of C.S. Lewis: from War to Joy (1945-1963) by Harry Lee Poe (2021); Life, Teachings, and Legacy of C.S. Lewis by Terry Glaspey (2022); The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind by Jason M. Baxter (2022); C. S. Lewis in America: Readings and Reception, 1935-1947 by Mark A. Noll; with contributions from Karen J. Johnson, Kirk D. Farney, and Amy E. Black (2023); C.S. Lewis' War against Scientism and Naturalism: A Detailed Examination of His Views by Jerry Bergman (2023); Chronicles of Faith: A Catholic Perspective on C.S. Lewis by Fintan Monahan (2024); The War for Middle-earth: J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Confront the Gathering Storm, 1933-1945 by Joseph Loconte (2024); The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien by John Hendrix (2024) Selected bibliography:
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