C. S. Lewis: The Recent Literature

Abstract

BOOK REVIEW C. S. LEWIS: THE RECENT LITERATURE When C. S. Lewis died on November 22, 1963, very few people noticed. Events of the same day in Dallas engulfed all other news. Nevertheless, Lewis, though dead for more than a decade, has not been forgotten. Indeed, a resurgence of interest in his writings has taken place in recent years. Many of these writings have a lasting quality far beyond anything which academic theologians might have predicted. Of the secondary literature on Lewis, much of the best has been provided by literary critics-a chastening thought for theologians. Charles Moorman's splendidly titled book, The Precincts of Felicity: The Augustinian City of the Oxford Christians (University of Florida Press, 1966), though now a decade old, remains a perceptive treatment of a central theme in Lewis (and others whom Moorman treats: Charles Williams, Dorothy Sayers, T. S. Eliot, J. R. R. Tolkien). More recently, Corbin Carnell has published an excellent study, Bright Shadow of Reality: C. S. Lewis and the Feeling Intellect (Eerdmans, 1974). His is a study of one central theme-that of Sehnsucht or romantic longing-in Lewis's writings. Despite the fact that some insightful treatments of Lewis have been available , however, his thought has seldom been done justice and has sometimes been badly characterized. Thus, for example, when Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper's C. S. Lewis: A Biography (Collins and Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974) appeared, the reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement (July 12, 1974) persistently described Lewis as a fundamentalist. Whether fundamentalism is or is not a good theological system is beside the point here. Rather, the point is simply the astonishing ignorance either of Lewis's writings or of fundamentalism which would permit such a characterization. In recent years, happily, some books have appeared which begin to do justice to Lewis's thought, leaving future reviewers without excuse. The biography by Green and Hooper is itself of value in certain respects. Green was a friend of Lewis for many years and Hooper was Lewis's personal secretary at the time of his death. The product of their joint labor will no doubt be " definitive " as a biography for some years to come, though it is, in fact, rather perfunctory and almost wholly lacking in the beauty which characterizes Lewis's own prose. The authors follow rather slavishly the outline of Lewis's own Surprised by Joy and display an attitude toward their subject little short of reverential. Nevertheless, the book 337 338 QIJ'..,BERT MEILAENDER does contain material which it is difficult to find elsewhere: chiefly, lengthy excerpts from some of Lewis's unpublished letters and an insider's account of Lewis's marriage late in life to the American divorcee, Joy Davidman Gresham. The latter is especially important, since Joy undoubtedly had an important influence on some of Lewis's later writings. It was her death which precipitated the searing power of A Grief Observed; her help which brought Till We Have Faces to fruition after its theme had been with Lewis for years and her person which served in some ways as a model for the character of Orual in that same book; their marriage which made Lewis's chapter on Eros in The Four Loves so much more lively (and earthy) than his earlier discussion of marriage in Mere Christianity. These three books-A Grief Observed, Till We Have Faces, and The Four Lovesall follow Lewis's marriage, and perhaps we owe it to Joy that these are the works in which Lewis most clearly articulates " the tether and pang of the particular," the pain of our creaturely condition, and the way in which grace wounds our nature in order to fulfill it. Thus, although the biography by Green and Hooper might have been far better than it is, it can at least be said to be authoritative, and it does provide some important and relatively unattainable material. Lewis, however , would have been the first person to recommend that we pay primary attention to an author's writings rather than his life. Several books, one of them very recent, attempt to do just that. I Paul Holmer's C. S. Lewis...