C. S. Lewis: Writer, Dreamer, and Mentor by Lionel Adey (review)

Abstract

TES,3I, 200o TES,3I, 200o been admired by other poets and Richard York and Michael Allen write of his considerable influence on Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (not to mention Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin). MacNeice wrote for various media and Alan Heuser contributes a useful overview of the poet's dramatic achievements, especially the parables, folktales, tragicomedies, and science fiction epics he wrote for BBC radio. Furthermore,many of the essays are shot through with an awarenessof MacNeice's 'Irishness'and an acknowledgement of how this shaped his early life and his poetic voice. In this way, LouisMacNeice andhisInfluence not only explains why previous criticsmay have found MacNeice elusive, but also sets up a new frameworkfor appreciating his impact. Instead of the usual I930S emphasis on Marx, Freud, Berlin, and so on, the poet is confronted on his own terms. MacNeice once wrote: 'The man who reads a poem and likes it, is doing something far too subtle for criticism'(p. 53). But the scholarsin this volume have risento the occasion. UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE ADAM FROST C. S. Lewis: Writer,Dreamer,andMentor. By LIONELADEY. Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge:Eerdmans. I998. x + 307 pp. $22;?I4.99. C. S. Lewis was a critic, novelist, theologian, and poet, and one of the most successfulChristianapologistsand writersof children'sstoriesof all time. He was a polymath, whose scholarshipand reading were vast, so that a phrase or idea in his work might come from Plato or Aristotle or any of a long line of authorsdown the centuries.It is one of the meritsof LionelAdey'sbook, the fruitof nearlythirtyyears of reading, that it is so alive to the range of his genius and of the influences upon him, and to the 'Old Westernculture',as he called it, of which he was a part. In this the workhas been conceived in the spiritof Lewishimself. Adey has chosen to comment upon the whole of Lewis's huge literary output, considering it genre by genre in successive chapters, beginning conventionally enough with thejuvenilia and then surveying,chapterby chapter, Lewis as literary historianand scholar,as criticand literarytheorist,as novelistand children'swriter, and as poet, essayistand correspondent. Each chapter bringsits subjectup to date with a surveyof Lewis'sown criticsand the present stateof opinion on him. The result is somewhat mixed. On the one hand, it involves the dispersal of overall orderlybiography and chronology, some repetition of points and material, and a lack of an holistic sense of Lewis'sown development and growth and of how one area of his activityfed into another, as Lewis has to relive large partsof his life chapter by chapter. On the other, Adey can give himself wholly to the particular theme in hand, as to Lewis's scholarship on the courtly love tradition and on Chaucer, Spenser,and Milton. The workis, however, more descriptivethan analytical.The introductorytheme of Lewis as imaginative Dreamer and rational Mentor is apparentlytoo general to be of much use, as it seldom recurswithin the text. There are long and sometimes confusing plot synopses of the fictional works, though paradoxically, a reader unfamiliarwith the originalsmight not alwaysfeel that he has enough information to understand the argument. There are occasional readings of Lewis which this readerfeels to be positivelyperverse,as in the idea that the ModernistBishopin The Great Divorce is a figure of contemplation. I cannot see why Lewis's explanation of myth (p. 236) should indicate 'obscurityor persiflage', and any one familiar with theAbolition ofManwould knowwhy LewisrejectedKeats'sdictum thatnothing can be known as trueuntil it is 'provedon our pulses'(p. 258). been admired by other poets and Richard York and Michael Allen write of his considerable influence on Michael Longley and Derek Mahon (not to mention Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin). MacNeice wrote for various media and Alan Heuser contributes a useful overview of the poet's dramatic achievements, especially the parables, folktales, tragicomedies, and science fiction epics he wrote for BBC radio. Furthermore,many of the essays are shot through with an awarenessof MacNeice's 'Irishness'and an acknowledgement of how this shaped his early life and his poetic voice. In this way, LouisMacNeice andhisInfluence not only explains why previous criticsmay have found MacNeice elusive, but...