At Arm’s Length

“I never had the opportunity of searching out God. He sought me out.
He stalked me like a redskin, took careful aim and fired.”
—C.S. Lewis

The disgruntled professor who equates academic integrity with paucity of book sales and who is thereby convinced that the masses who follow the writings of C.S. Lewis must be a cult of sorts, will take a perverse delight in the publication of his journal. And after reading it even the firmest disciple will have to admit that almost all of the 450 pages of entries are a repetitive chronicle of his daily round, replete with recordings of the weather and accounts of friends and companions now lost to the ages. He will have to admit, that is, that the diary was published with the clear expectation that Lewis’s readers are interested first in the man and his writing only secondarily. Along the way one can find (as introduction, flyleaf, and preface promise) what a great writer’s diary ought to give—signs of development, surmises that will one day be published convictions, sudden revelations of thought, etc.—but they are never in the foreground, and by the end of the book the reader has had no hint of how in these early years Lewis was making himself into a writer who would change the hearts and minds and faith of millions.

The journal is finally profitable for what it does not say. These were the years that Lewis, later in life, would refer to as his period of “hotheaded atheism”; the diary brings us almost to the brink of the sudden and dramatic conversion he recounted in his celebrated autobiography, Surprised by Joy. But we witness no hotheaded atheism at all in the journal, no antagonistic fun poked at believing friends, no jumping on Russell’s, Freud’s, or Nietzsche’s bandwagon: the man we see is very much like the man we know. He recounts with rare pleasure his nature walks; he relishes conversation, tea, thick books, and baths. He befriends the plodder, is openly dismissive of the demagogue, and is amused by all the chatty dons at Oxford. More importantly, he holds the world at arm’s length, as the Christian Lewis was to do. Tolkien he greatly admires, although he “needs a few good slaps.” Much of Dickens is overrated, and Dryden is entirely a “rum thing.” Christianity is simply one of the many options he holds at bay. Lewis will take his turn reading the lesson at chapel, but with some reluctance; he will attend Mass with his father mainly for the sake of family harmony.

Though he held his atheism with complete conviction, Lewis-the-youthful-persecutor-of-Christians seems to be entirely a creation of his later years. His heathenism was a rhetorical ploy to put a human face on his uncompromising and unconditional apologetics. As his friend and confessor, Austin Farrer, was later to say, the persona Lewis as author chose for himself invited the reader to “look and see that such a man as I am can become an orthodox Christian.” Thus he made himself not only the rhetorical enemy of Christ, but the actual enemy as well.

We must abandon the Damascan road drama that has become so indissolubly attached to Lewis’s name. Those who berate him really cannot claim the intellectual turncoat who gave up on the grim new world rigor of modern atheism in order to speak comfortably to the masses; and those who love him cannot prove the wizard of dialectics who with sheer force of logic brought the toughest Babylonian to his knees.

The essays collected by Schakel and Huttar are a good indication of the high level of discussion achievable once both political correctness and hagiography are dismissed. Their title could not have been better chosen: word and story, philology and literature—these were Lewis’s towering strengths. But the collection demonstrates this fact by examining his work not only in these fields—whether the Narnia sagas or the (ageless) studies in medieval and Renaissance literature, the novels or the Studies in Words—but in his Christian apologetics, where Lewis also employed the tools of the literary artist and scholar. Far from being a mere logic chopper, Lewis defended his faith in the explicitly theological writings by resurrecting ancient meanings and by distilling ancient stories. He once reminded an audience of fledgling priests that when they used the word “dogma” the connotation for most of their congregation would be “an unproved assertion delivered in an arrogant manner.” This was his method in a nutshell. The Abolition of Man reconverted multitudes to traditional morality by exposing the ideology of high school English textbooks; his history of the word “world” incorporates some of his finest theology; and he went to war against Hume largely by analyzing a myth.

None of this detracts in any way from the power of his arguments. It is to say that he was far more interested in shedding light on the world than in the endless tit-for-tat of philosophical debate. Indeed, and as he would be the first to remind us, the verb “to demonstrate” in its Latin root means “to point out clearly” and therefore has far more to do with “shedding light” than it does with the forcing of assent by unanswerable argument. Thus, he chose signposts—metaphors, allegories, narratives—to circumscribe the majesty of God, bringing Him to bear upon our late and confused modernity with the clarity of good writing and the correct use of words.

But if the diary dismisses a persona it also confirms a fact, one for which the vilifiers would trade the persona without hesitation. To the dismay of Lewis’s admirers, his biographers have persisted in stating that up until the time he won a faculty fellowship and moved into his permanent rooms at Magdalen College, he had a live-in love affair with a woman twice his age. To make matters worse, the woman was the mother of a close friend whom Lewis had promised to care for should the son not return (as he did not) from the First World War.

What of it? He did not then believe, and he would neither ape the forms of matrimony nor sow his wild oats (he was faithful to her throughout) before “settling down.” The diary makes it clear that after moving on to Magdalen he visited his former lover every day and was her sole provider in her final years. When he did find a world to embrace—or rather when it embraced him—he acted again in complete disregard of conventions: he married late in life a woman with a terminal cancer and loved her to the end.

[All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C.S. Lewis, 1922-1927, edited by Walter Hooper; Foreword by Owen Barfield (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich) 508 pp., $22.95]

[Word and Story in C.S. Lewis, edited by Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press) 316 pp., $37.50]