George Sayer - Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis

Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis.

Copyright 1988, 1994 by George Sayer

First edition titled Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times ,
published in 1988 by Harper & Row.

Second edition published by
Crossway Books
a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers
1300 Crescent Street
Wheaton, Illinois 60187.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided by USA copyright law.

Excerpt from Loves as warm as tears in Poems by C. S. Lewis, copyright 1964 by the Executors of the Estate of C. S. Lewis and renewed 1992 by the C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd., reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

Excerpt from Spirits in Bondage by C. S. Lewis, edited by Walter Hooper, copyright 1984 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd., reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company.

Cover design: Jon McGrath

Cover photo: Hulton Deutsch Collection, Ltd.

First printing, Crossway edition, 1994

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Sayer, George.
Jack : a life of C. S. Lewis / George Sayer. 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Jack: C. S. Lewis and his times. 1st ed. 1988.
1. Lewis, C. S. (Clive Staples), 1898-1963. 2. Authors, English 20th century-Biography. I. Title.
PR6023.E926Z88 1994 823'.912dc20 [B] 93-26860
ISBN 1-58134-739-1

17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05
16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To my wife
Margaret

Table of Contents

I am deeply grateful to manyto Walter Hooper who first suggested that I should write something about C. S. Lewis; to the late Clyde S. Kilby who invited me to give the Wade lecture on Lewis at Wheaton College, put at my disposal the magnificent Wade Collection of Lewis material assembled there and gave me limitless help and hospitality; to his successor, Lyle Dorsett, and to all members of the staff there, especially Marjorie Mead, without whose patience and encouragement I should certainly not have finished this book.

Among other individuals I want to thank Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs and her husband, the late Leonard Blake. I am indebted also to some who are no longer aliveStephen Schofield, Dom. Bede Griffiths, the Rev. R. H. Head, Dr. R. E. Havard, A. F. Lace, Hugh Sinclair, Sir Donald Hardman, and Sir Alexander Clutterbuck.

Further, I am grateful to:

Messrs Curtis Brown on behalf of the C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd. for permission to quote numerous passages from unpublished and published letters and diaries of C. S. Lewis; to print a short poem by Joy Lewis and to quote from her letters; to quote from Spirits in Bondage , Essays Presented to Charles Williams, and The Personal Heresy .

Curtis Brown and Macmillan Publishing Company for per ix mission to quote part of a letter from Bill Gresham printed in And God Came In by Lyle Dorsett.

HarperCollins for permission to quote from Surprised by Joy, The Four Loves, Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, Dymer, They Stand Together, C. S. Lewis: A Biography by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, and from The Inklings by Humphrey Carpenter.

Cambridge University Press for permission to quote from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, Selected Literary Essays , and An Experiment in Criticism .

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich for permission to quote from Spirits in Bondage , That Hideous Strength , Poems, Dymer, and Light on C. S. Lewis .

The Marion E. Wade Collection for permission to quote numerous passages from the letters, diaries, and other writings of Major W. H. Lewis.

Oxford University Press for permission to quote from The Allegory of Love, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century , and A Preface to Paradise Lost.

The estate of the late Dame Helen Gardner for permission to quote from her British Academy Lecture on C. S. Lewis.

Lady Dunbar of Hempriggs for permission to quote from letters written by her mother.

Shelley Fawcett for permission to quote from a letter by his father, Hugh IA. Fausset.

I have made every effort to trace the present-day holders of the copyrights to the material that I have used. If the copyright holders will let me know of any errors or omissions, I shall be happy to rectify these in subsequent editions.

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since I first met George Sayer. In the early 1980s I decided to write a biography of Joy Davidman, wife of C. S. Lewis. Part of my research involved interviewing people who knew Joy and could shed light on her life with Mr. Lewis. Mr. Sayer not only granted an interviewhe insisted that my wife, Mary, our daughter, Erika, and I join him for dinner and spend the night in his lovely home in Malvern, England. George Sayer did more than offer gracious hospitality; he proved to be an unexpectedly valuable source of information. He and his late wife, Moira, not only knew Joythey became two of her friends in England. Although my goal was to gather information on Joy Davidman and her relationship with C. S. Lewis, it quickly became apparent that Mr. Sayer probably knew Lewis better than any other living person. Sayer had been one of Lewiss students at Magdalen College, Oxford, and subsequently Lewis encouraged Sayer as a teacher and scholar. Over the years the two men became close friends, and before and after Joys death in 1960 Jack spent holidays almost every summer visiting the Sayers and hiking the mountains of the Great Malvern area with George. Because George Sayer was intimately acquainted with Lewiss world of life and letters, it occurred to me as well as to several others who knew George that he should write a biography of C. S. Lewis. Eventually he agreed.

Although there are numerous books on C. S. Lewis, and while some of the Lewis biographies are usefulin particular the one by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper, and the ones by Chad Walsh and William Griffin respectivelythis one by Sayer is superior to all the others for several reasons. First, he knew Lewis better and for more years than other biographers. Second, he knew Lewis in a variety of contexts. And finally he knew Joy and her sons, as well as many of the famous writers relatives and friends.

Jack is an important book that deserves to be released in a new edition after nearly twenty years in print. At once a major interpretive and narrative work, it is also a primary source replete with the reminiscences of one who knew Lewis well. This book should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand Lewis the man.

Lyle W. Dorsett
Beeson Divinity School
Samford University

M uch of the material for a biography of C. S. Lewis is easily available to the student. It has been assiduously collected for the Bodleian Library, Oxford, by the Reverend Walter Hooper; and for the Wade Collection, Wheaton College, Illinois, by Professor Clyde Kilby. Thanks to a sharing arrangement, nearly all manuscripts can be consulted in either library. The important exception is the complete text of the diary kept by Major W. H. Lewis, which is at present available only at Wheaton.

The student should be warned that the following sources were edited before reaching these libraries:

The Lewis Papers , 11 volumes (Leeborough Press). This collection of family papers was assembled by Albert Lewis, the father of W. H. and C. S. Lewis, edited and typed by Warren after his fathers death, and bound in Oxford. The original documents were then destroyed. Many letters and other documents of great interest, such as C. S. Lewiss school reports, were never included at all. There is reason to suppose that some letters were cut or altered before being included.