C. S. Lewis: A Biography

C. S. Lewis: A Biography
A. N. Wilson

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis.C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the clever child from the ‘Little End Room’ of his Ulster childhood and adult life, exploring Lewis’s unwilling conversion to Christianity, the genesis of his writing, and the web of his relationships.

C.S. Lewis

A Biography

A.N. Wilson

For Ruth

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u6b98ec77-4082-5a63-89fe-95d0b6473995)

Title Page (#u6ba0c7c8-02e6-5b4e-b72b-f44191345101)

PREFACE – THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE (#u660c414f-1dbd-516c-8c90-7b004c75ecae)

ONE – ANTECEDENTS (#u7afc1caf-eda3-5487-80b3-7176b8cc7e77)

TWO – EARLY DAYS 1898–1905 (#u423840fc-28de-5fba-b712-593acd48aebe)

THREE – LITTLE LEA 1905–1908 (#u0b65fc60-de9b-5971-b0fd-78109155ce60)

FOUR – SCHOOLS 1908–1914 (#uc60540ce-a422-5331-9753-7072d4aed318)

FIVE – THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917 (#u3860b317-a916-55dc-a708-c2c7bb5c84d0)

SIX – THE ANGEL OF PAIN 1917–1918 (#ufcda2c58-9176-5c67-8393-6bea7be6b4fe)

SEVEN – UNDERGRADUATE 1919–1922 (#ub2a04fbf-8304-5285-9f47-bcb338c94760)

EIGHT – HEAVY LEWIS 1922–1925 (#litres_trial_promo)

NINE – REDEMPTION BY PARRICIDE 1925–1929 (#litres_trial_promo)

TEN – MYTHOPOEIA 1929–1931 (#litres_trial_promo)

ELEVEN – REGRESS 1931–1936 (#litres_trial_promo)

TWELVE – THE INKLINGS 1936–1939 (#litres_trial_promo)

THIRTEEN – SCREWTAPE 1939–1942 (#litres_trial_promo)

FOURTEEN – SEPARATIONS 1942–1945 (#litres_trial_promo)

FIFTEEN – NARNIA 1945–1951 (#litres_trial_promo)

SIXTEEN – THE SILVER CHAIR 1951–1954 (#litres_trial_promo)

SEVENTEEN – SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN 1954–1957 (#litres_trial_promo)

EIGHTEEN – MARRIAGE 1957–1959 (#litres_trial_promo)

NINETEEN – MEN MUST ENDURE 1959–1960 (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY – LAST YEARS 1960–1963 (#litres_trial_promo)

TWENTY-ONE – FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN (#litres_trial_promo)

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPY (#litres_trial_promo)

INDEX (#litres_trial_promo)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Sources (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

–PREFACE– THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE (#ulink_bcaf5710-b9e3-5fea-af0f-a2ed5f7e99a8)

A child pushed open the door of the wardrobe so as to hide in it. It was, however, no ordinary wardrobe. It was hung with fur coats. The child pressed on further through the dark recesses of the cupboard, pushing aside the soft folds of fur and discovering beyond them a new world. What crunched beneath the feet was not mothballs but snow. Lucy had discovered Narnia.

Millions of readers throughout the world have been thrilled by this moment in C. S. Lewis’s story The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and have gone on to read the six other stories which he wrote about that other world behind the wardrobe, the world of Narnia. The powerfulness of the stories derives in part from the immediacy of Lewis’s rough-hewn style, but more, surely, from the fact that this image touches something so very deep in so many people.

‘If everything on earth were rational,’ someone remarks in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, ‘nothing would happen.’ Nothing much would appear to have happened in the life of C. S. Lewis, who for his entire adult life was a scholar and teacher at Oxford and Cambridge in England. He did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people. His days were filled with writing and reading and domestic chores. And yet books about him continue to pour from the presses on both sides of the Atlantic.

This phenomenon can only be explained by the fact that his writings, while being self-consciously and deliberately at variance with the twentieth century, are paradoxically in tune with the needs and concerns of our times. Everything on earth is not rational, and attempts to live by reason have all failed. The world has changed more radically in the last hundred years than in any previous era of history. Old values and certainties have been destroyed; religions have collapsed. In such a world, a voice which appears to come from the old world and to speak with the old sureness will have an obvious appeal. Lewis’s attempts to justify an old-fashioned Christian orthodoxy have made him an internationally celebrated and reassuring figure to those believers who have felt betrayed by the compromises of the mainline Christian churches. Lewis, to the amazement of those who knew him in his lifetime, has become in the quarter-century since he died something very like a saint in the minds of conservative-minded believers.

It is not the rational Lewis who makes this enormous appeal, the Lewis who lectured on medieval and Renaissance literature with such superb fluency and wide-ranging erudition to generations of English students. It is the Lewis who plumbed the irrational depths of childhood and religion who speaks to the present generation.

Though all Freud’s theories about the origins of consciousness may be disavowed, this remains the century of Freud. We have learnt that our lives are profoundly affected by what happened to us when we were very young children, and that wherever we travel in mind or body we are compelled to repeat or work out the drama of early years. If this were a work of psychoanalysis or literary theory, I should feel compelled to test The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by the theories of the human mind which have been adopted and discarded by psychoanalysts and philosophers in the last hundred years. But these are not areas which admit of rational enquiry, even if I were qualified to explore them, and Lewis himself would have been equally anxious to remind us of the whole European philosophical tradition since Plato which has attempted in the language of metaphysics to account for our sense that we do not belong in this world, that we are pilgrims and strangers here, homesick for another place where one day we shall be truly ourselves.

Two journeys, made in the course of my researches for this biography, have brought home to me more vividly than any others the strange nature of my task.

The first was to Belfast in Northern Ireland. For those who are not Irish, their first glimpse of modern Belfast is a shock. Much of its ancient prosperity, derived from its magnificent shipyards, has gone. There is widespread unemployment and poverty. Walking the streets of the working-class districts of the city one is confronted by distressing images of human irrationality. Even the kerbstones shriek of their religious and political allegiance. Protestant, Unionist streets are painted red, white and blue in praise of the Queen and the Reformation. Catholic, Nationalist streets are daubed white, green and orange for Ireland and the Pope. In no place on earth does it seem truer that Christ came to bring not peace, but a sword. The post offices and police stations are barricaded like fortresses. There is no prospect here of the rational prevailing. Every week that passes, a bomb explodes or a gun is fired because of ancient, atavistic religious prejudice.

It would not be the best place in the world to take a non-believer in the hope of persuading him or her that Christianity was a very ennobling belief, but it is a very good place for a Christian to recognize what a small part reason plays in most human lives; and it might very well prompt the visitor, and even more the resident, to hope that some form of Christianity could be expounded which was the agreed and good thing which all Christians hold in common, the set of unchanging and saving beliefs which Lewis named Mere Christianity.