Spending Time With C.S. Lewis

If my posts seem somewhat "Lewisian" for a while, blame Alan Jacobs! On Friday I finished his wonderful book The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis. This is a new scholarly biography of Lewis published by HarperSanFrancisco in 2005. Jacobs is a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois. I don't think it's going out on much of a limb to say this will become, for many people, one of the (if not "the") definitive biographies of Lewis' life and work.

I'm not really qualified to say that, having mostly read bits and pieces of other biographies and articles about Lewis' life over the years. Of course I've read Lewis' own Surprised by Joy, and I've also really enjoyed Humphrey Carpenter's reflections on Lewis in his book on The Inklings. I thought I had a pretty good grasp of at least the outline of Lewis' journey to faith, and his life work as teacher, apologist and storyteller.

But Jacobs' book just overwhelmed me by giving me a powerful sense of Lewis as a person. It's written in beautiful, clear prose; it paints a portrait of Lewis that is, on the one hand, highly respectful of his amazing imagination, mind and heart, and on the other, doesn't try to gloss over his real human foibles and struggles (pre OR post conversion). There's a tendency in some circles, especially among those of us who share the same Christian faith as Lewis (and anywhere near his Christian tradition, as I do since I'm Episcopalian) to make Lewis into a bit of a plaster saint. In fact, when I was in seminary he was affectionately referred to as "Saint Jack" most of the time. How Lewis himself would have chuckled to have known he would be lauded for any particular sanctity. I think he would have seen himself a "saint" only in the humble sense of one of a communion of many fellow-travellers, walking in the way of Jesus.

I do plan to post some notes and reflections on a few of the specific passages that moved me -- though it's hard to know where to begin. I cried most of the way through the last chapter and the afterword, both because they were written with such heart, and because I felt as though I had spent several days in Lewis' company, and would miss him. Biographies don't usually have this kind of effect on me!

I think Jacobs has done a real service to literature about Lewis too, in that he is at great pains to look at his life (from start to finish) through that lens of "imagination." The main question he tries to keep front and center for most of the book, either explicitly or implicitly, is what caused Lewis, late in his life, to write stories for children? And not just any stories, but works of such depth and imagination and love that they have become for many children, over generations, some of our very favorite stories, books we want to inhabit again and again? When you think about it, it does seem somewhat unlikely, at least on the surface, that an Oxford tutor, later Cambridge professor of medieval and renaissance studies, a bachelor for most of his life (with relatively few contacts with young children) would "suddenly" in the decade of his 50s, start writing the Narnia stories. Some biographers, like the controversial A.N. Wilson, have apparently postulated rather eccentric theories for it. But Jacobs' take seems true at its heart, and true to a careful reading of the best sources about Lewis' life (including his own books and letters). When you really begin to trace his love of story, of fantasy and faerie -- when you begin to see what most profoundly shaped Lewis in his life choices, his turn to faith, his sense of himself -- then the fact that he began to write the Narnia stories doesn't seem odd at all, only oddly satisfying and somehow obvious.

I followed up The Narnian with a very quick read through of C.S. Lewis: Letters to Children. It's a very slim volume, but worth its weight in gold, and it gave me at least one more day of time "with" Lewis. A few of the letters are oft-quoted in biographies but it was enjoyable to read them in full and in the context of other letters he wrote to children over the years. What struck me, beyond Lewis' warmth and humour, is how patient he was -- how much time he really gave to answering the same kinds of questions over and over again from young readers. Clearly too, they often sent him their own stories and poems, as well as drawings and paintings they had made based on his stories. He didn't just thank them for these gifts, but commented on them -- charitably but also thoughtfully, sometimes even offering helpful artistic critiques of the poems. There's not a condescending note anywhere. He respected these children and their growing imagination, and one feels he understands them in part because like him, they love stories. He also encouraged children in their faith lives in beautiful ways. One of my favorite lines comes in a letter he wrote to a girl named Ruth less than a month before he died:

"If you continue to love Jesus, nothing much can go wrong with you, and I hope you always do so," he wrote. And then added, "I'm so thankful that you realized [the] "hidden story" in the Narnia books. It is odd, children nearly always do, grown-ups hardly ever."

May I always stay child-like enough to realize the "hidden story" wherever it peeks out at us.