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

      C.S. Lewis

      A Biography

      

      A.N. Wilson

      

      For Ruth

      Table of Contents

       Cover Page

       Title Page

PREFACE – THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

ONE – ANTECEDENTS

TWO – EARLY DAYS 1898–1905

THREE – LITTLE LEA 1905–1908

FOUR – SCHOOLS 1908–1914

FIVE – THE GREAT KNOCK 1914–1917

SIX – THE ANGEL OF PAIN 1917–1918

SEVEN – UNDERGRADUATE 1919–1922

       EIGHT – HEAVY LEWIS 1922–1925

       NINE – REDEMPTION BY PARRICIDE 1925–1929

       TEN – MYTHOPOEIA 1929–1931

       ELEVEN – REGRESS 1931–1936

       TWELVE – THE INKLINGS 1936–1939

       THIRTEEN – SCREWTAPE 1939–1942

       FOURTEEN – SEPARATIONS 1942–1945

       FIFTEEN – NARNIA 1945–1951

       SIXTEEN – THE SILVER CHAIR 1951–1954

       SEVENTEEN – SMOKE ON THE MOUNTAIN 1954–1957

       EIGHTEEN – MARRIAGE 1957–1959

       NINETEEN – MEN MUST ENDURE 1959–1960

       TWENTY – LAST YEARS 1960–1963

       TWENTY-ONE – FURTHER UP AND FURTHER IN

       SELECT BIBLIOGRAPY

       INDEX

       ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

       About the Author

       Sources

       Praise

       By the same author

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       –PREFACE– THE QUEST FOR A WARDROBE

      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. Lewis’s 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 Lewis’s 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 Dostoyevsky’s 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. Lewis’s 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 Freud’s 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