There is always a danger in bringing up C. S. Lewis in a conversation with people you do not know well. As a professor once told me, “most people either love him or hate him.” And sometimes the ones who hate him have not read him very well or deeply. When I proposed doing a thesis on him in graduate school, the professor who covered 20th-century English literature said to me something along the lines of: Wasn’t Lewis a fascist during the war—I mean, all that stuff about the lion coming to save the day, the appeal to authority?
I didn’t know where to start with such ignorance. But there is a danger also in talking with (or reading) those who love Lewis. They are apt to call him “Jack,” as if they knew him all their lives, and they can’t stop quoting him. The word smarmy describes some of these acolytes, and I used to be a bit smarmy myself in my younger days.
Of course, Lewis was a great prose stylist in his literary criticism: John Wain, no admirer of J. R.R Tolkien’s work or Lewis’s science fiction/fantasy, claims in an essay in this volume that “Lewis is the best writer of expository prose that modern England has to show.” So for one who is familiar with him, it is easy to quote him; and as I’ve read now more than once, it always seems that Lewis has gotten “there” before you, and said it better than you ever could.
The refreshing thing about C. S. Lewis and His Circle is that the transcribed talks given to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society, which began in 1982 and are included here, almost always avoid the smarminess. It is refreshing to read Tom Shippey say that “although I admire Lewis and Tolkien very much, there are times when both of them get on my nerves.” Refreshing, as well, to read Archbishop Rowan Williams talking about the strengths and weaknesses of That Hideous Strength, the third volume of Lewis’s science fiction trilogy. And John Wain balances out the story of Lewis and his brother Warnie by focusing on Warnie, revealed here as the charming, courteous, and unambitious man he was.
It is difficult to say which essays, which memoirs, are most enjoyable, but two come to mind: “W. H. Auden and the Inklings” by Michael Piret, dean of divinity at Magdalen College, Oxford, and “Marrying C. S. Lewis” by the Anglican priest Peter Bide. Here is Piret on Auden, who returned to the Anglican fold partly because of the works of Lewis and Charles Williams, and who was a great admirer of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings despite the hectoring of Edmund Wilson:
And here is Bide discussing how he married Lewis and Joy Davidman:
And that is the main thing, what Lewis was all about—whether you agree with him or not—and what this book is about: Lewis wanted to know the truth about the universe, and he described his quest for this truth with brilliance, imagination, and what he himself called his “bow-wow dogmatism.”
Frank Freeman is a writer in Maine.
