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

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. Lewiss 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 Lewiss 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 Dostoyevskys 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. Lewiss 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 Freuds 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.

Driving out of the beleaguered city into the suburbs is immediately to encounter a different, happier world, a prosperous middle-class place which knows no violence; big, comfortable houses built to sustain and celebrate the simple happiness of family life. Down one such leafy road, you will find the house built by a Belfast police solicitor named Albert Lewis in 1905. It was in this lumpy Edwardian villa that C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren spent the most crucial period of their lives. Climbing up the small back staircase, I reached a landing on the second floor of the house, and there at the end of the corridor I found the Little End Room where the boys had escaped from the grown-ups and indulged their childhood games.

For Lewis himself, it was not a house with happy memories, for it was here that the catastrophe of his life took place: the death of his mother on 23 August 1908, when Lewis was nine years old. The loss was something which he bottled up within himself, unable to appease it through the emotionally stultifying years of boarding-school education in England. In terms of his emotional life, the quest for his lost mother dominated his relations with women. His companion for over thirty years was a woman old enough to be his mother; and when she died it was not long before, like a Pavlovian dog trained to lacerate his heart with the same emotional experiences, he married a woman whose circumstances were exactly parallel to those of his own mother in 1908 a woman dying of cancer who had two small sons.

Standing in the Little End Room, I realized that I was beginning to come to terms with the Lewis phenomenon, and why it had such a hugely popular appeal. I had thought to go there merely in order to soak up atmosphere. I realized that what Lewis was seeking with such painful earnestness all his life was not to be found in this house; nor had it ever been, for any of the time he had lived there after his mothers death. Without the capacity to develop an ordinary emotional life, based on a stable relationship with parents, Lewis was driven back and back into the Little End Room, further up and further in.

It would have been good to see the wardrobe in Belfast, but it was not there. To see that, I journeyed over three and a half thousand miles to a small liberal arts college in the suburbs of Chicago: Wheaton College, Illinois. Between the two journeys I had spent months reading Lewis, and hours talking to those who knew him. An image of what he was actually like, as a man, was by now vividly clear to me. The reasons why many of his Oxford colleagues had disliked him were obvious. He was argumentative and bullying. His jolly, red, honest face was that of an intellectual bruiser. He was loud, and he could be coarse. He liked what he called mans talk, and he was frequently contemptuous in his remarks about the opposite sex. He was a heavy smoker sixty cigarettes a day between pipes and he liked to drink deep, roaring out his unfashionable views in Oxford bars. This the beer and Beowulf Lewis was understandably uncongenial to those of a different temperament. But I had also learnt that he was a kind and patient teacher, a loyal friend, a magnificently astute and intelligent conversationalist who had read much and who had the capacity to fire his hearers with a longing to read his favourite authors for themselves. Few of his friends had ever heard Lewis allude to his inner life, and even his religion was more to be taken for granted than to be aired in conversation. The gatherings of cronies in pubs or college rooms had no feeling of an evangelical prayer group. Two members of that celebrated group, known as the Inklings, have told me that there was always an air of English embarrassment when the subject of religion cropped up, and that Lewiss activities as a religious broadcaster and writer were not something with which his fellow-Christians in the Inklings felt at ease. These men knew almost nothing of the Lewis who had emerged in my reading of private letters and diaries. They knew nothing from him of his childhood trauma, little of his two great emotional attachments to women, and next to nothing of his spiritual journey, even though one of these men, Hugo Dyson, had been responsible in part for persuading Lewis to abandon atheism and become a Christian.