The varnished truth
Norman St John-Stevas
C. S. Lewis: A Biography Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper (Collins £3.50) C. S. Lewis was the sort of man who presents almost insoluble problems to a biographer: he was a many-sided and complicated genius to Whom very little happened — in the external world, that is. His intellectual life on the other hand was rich and deep, characterised by seismic events which led him from youthful atheism to a profound and orthodox faith reminiscent in its uncompromisingness of the great St Augustine. Furthermore he was a born communicator and this led him out of the cloistered life of a don to become the English speaking world's greatest contemporary theological populariser and apologist, doing for Christianity what Chesterton had done for Catholicism. I do not know who is the ideal Person to write the biography of such a man, but it is certainly not two devoted friends and disciples, such as the present authors, who are restrained by the reticences of affection and intimacy from the ruthless probing and stripPing away which one day will have to be done. Mr Green and Mr Hooper have written a valuable and worthy book but somehow the essence of their quarry has escaped them and they tantalise more than satisfy. C. S. Lewis came from an Ulster background of middle class lawyers and clergymen with all feminine influence cut off untimely with the death of his mother when he was only ten. An unhappy period at Malvern when he was rePelled but not apparently much tempted by "tarting" and "bloodery" was followed by a liberating escape to Oxford, a brief period of service at the front in the first world war, and then a tranquil life as a don first at Oxford and in his latter years at Cambridge, a translation which was to be for him a second spring. The academic life is not an exhilarating one, but it was the essential setting for his genius to *mature and flower. As a scholar of English literature Lewis made a considerable contribution. He.placed a stamp 9n the English school at Oxford which was to last for quarter of a century although even before his death, the study of the hated modern Poets was making inroads into the walled garden of the Anglo-Saxons and the Medievals Which he had laboured so valiantly if narrowly to create. His major work of scholarship, The Allegory of Love is one of those rare academic works that survives its own time. Yet it is the Writings which spring more directly from his Christian imagination, such as the incomparable seven of Narnia — the children's books which are certainly that but also very Much more — and the great popular theological tracts, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape A4etters, The Four Loves and The Letters to ale°1m, which will form the basis of his lasting fame. .. They sprang as did his conversion to Christianity from his own deep inner life and they _iwere given form not only by his literary sensivity but by his deep commitment to theology. ,B_ooks of religious devotion as such never really interested him. C. S. Lewis was a thorough Intellectual. Music, Wagner apart, does not Seem to have appealed to him. He preferred to Tad Shakespeare's plays rather than to see them acted. He was responsive to the beauties of nature and was fortunate enough to pass the Whole of his middle life amidst the beauties of s agdalen grove, but human artifacts had no pell for him. He was in no sense an aesthete as the utilitarian furnishings of his rooms pro claimed. He was a man's man, and there is a tang of tobacco and leather about him, which is not wholly attractive, a heartiness of beer and boots and a puritanism which some might find repellent.
Yet behind these externals the glory was profoundly at work and the joy which was the Omnipotence's gift to him was determinedly breaking in. His intellect controlled and channelled the flow but the flow was everything and inexorably washed him up onto the Christian shore. As a child he was invaded from time to time by joy and when in 1924 he abandoned the aridities of atheism for the great theistic ocean it was the imagery of Hippolytus which mediated to him the longing rhich God had for him and to which when he was ready he made such a generous response. The invitation to faith came clearly and unmistakably in the prosaic setting of the top of an omnibus ascending HeEklington Hill: the revelation of the Christian Lord came on the way to Whipsnade Zoo.
C. S. Lewis's emotions had been directed into friendship (mainly masculine) and literary creativity, but they had also taken some odder paths. What is one to make of his relationship with Mrs Moore, the mother of an army friend, who did not return from the front, and whom he looked after for the rest of her life, setting her up in a house at Headington and caring for her until she died at the age of seventy-nine? Was it compassion for one in need, fidelity to a brotherly vow, or the setting up of a substitute for the long-dead mother of years ago? We do not know and the biographers do little to help us. Mrs Moore appears to have been a most unattractive lady. She was possessive, thoughtless and selfish, never scrupling to interrupt the scholar's work to get him to discharge the most menial of domestic tasks: as she.remarked herself in a moment of uncomprehending truth: "he is as good as an extra maid in the house." Death having eventually relieved him of this burden in 1951, C. S. Lewis set out resolutely to acquire another, marrying an American divorcée with two children, Joy Davidman, to save her from deportation to her native America. This time, however, the Almighty was too clever for him., and what had started as a duty became a joy indeed, C. S. Lewis was clearly a mystic, not to the degree of his Anglican friend Charles Williams, by whom his biographers suggest some thought he may have been "taken in" (to make such a suggestion and then leave it hanging in the air is surely unjust to both the friends) but a mystic nonetheless. Yet there was nothing of the gnostic about him. He had no time at all for the de-mythologisers and the neo-modernists. For him Dr Robinson, then Bishop of Woolwich, was always the Bishop of Woolworths. "Never let us think," he wrote to the mythical Malcolm, "that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstrac tions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions: each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective . . . What soul ever perished from believing that God the Father really had a beard?" This is polemic of a high order, reminiscent not so much of Chesterton as of Newman in his more acerbic mo ments: "Birmingham people have souls." But there is more to Lewis's theology than that. His reflections on the resurrected body have the ring of prophetic truth: "What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life matter would be nothing to us if it were not a source of sensations . . . At present we tend to think of the soul as somehow 'inside' the body. But the glorified body of the resurrection as I conceive it — the sensuous life raised from its death — will be inside the soul. . . guesses, of course, only guesses. If they are not true, something better will be." That is the tone not only of the subtle theologian but of the humble man of God.
Norman St John-Stevas is Conservative MP for Chelmsford
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