Customer Reviews

C. S. Lewis: A Biography

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

I cannot claim familiarity with all of the other biographies of C.S. Lewis, but I do know a good book when I read one. This is an absorbing, revealing, if controversial, account of Lewis. Readers should not be afraid to tackle a biography written by someone who did not know Lewis personally-- this distance is one of the strengths of Wilson's book, for it is not clouded by sentimental recollections. Most importantly, you will be encouraged to read more of Lewis himself, particularly the lesser known works and literary criticism. Wilson offers excellent insights into these works which are largely forgotten, due to the popularity of a handful of other writings.

Wilson pushes readers to start from scratch in constructing an image of Lewis: Lewis the entire man--scholar, teacher, brother, lover, and fallen human being. We are discouraged from holding fast to a more typical tidy portrait of Lewis: the affable author of a select group of Christian books and children's fantasy stories. (I love the Narnia books, by the way, and my esteem for them has not been dampened whatsoever by this book.)

I didn't agree with every one of Wilson's assertions about Lewis's character or motivations, but again, Wilson's unwillingness merely to reinforce the accepted line is a great strength. Wilson's analysis is a challenge, not a conclusive rendering of absolutes. Approach it with that understanding, allow yourself to be challenged, and the experience of reading this book will be ultimately satisfying. Antoher tip: read the preface again after you've finished the book for a more complete grasp of Wilson's intentions.

Yes, read other accounts of Lewis for the broadest spectrum of perspectives possible. But don't leave this one out. Not surprisingly, those only interested in pointing out errors and shutting their minds to fresh insights will be disappointed.

Despite a vast amount of literature on C. S. Lewis, there are surprisingly a dearth of good biographies. In most, Lewis emerges as a bit of a plastic saint, just a little too good to be true, a bit of a high-church protestant saint. This is especially true in evangelical American circles, where many imagine Lewis to have been a nonsmoking abstainer from alcohol. Many will react with shock and dismay upon learning that Lewis's smoked so heavily that he was the probable cause of his relatively early death and his drinking was considerable, and may have bordered on the alcoholic.

As a corrective to this goody-goody Lewis, Wilson provides us with a warts and all flesh-and-blood corrective. He gives us the hard drinking, mildly bawdy, addictive smoker who has a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother and a premarital relationship with a woman he would later marry.

There are two questions to ask here. First, are Wilson's "facts" accurate? There doesn't seem to be much reason to doubt many of them. Second, are these adequate to create a good biography? No. Wilson's biography is valuable for one and only one reason: he delves into the aspects of Lewis's life that the other biographers would prefer to either ignore or pretend didn't exist. He also gives a slightly different slant on many of Lewis's intellectual and religious interests. But apart from the book's valuable debunking, it is a fairly lame biography. Lewis doesn't emerge as a particularly attractive person. He doesn't, in fact, emerge much as a person at all. Wilson doesn't doo much of a job of showing what made Lewis click at all. And while he does do a good job of showing that the St. Jack portraits of Lewis are all mildly bogus, he doesn't really provide us with an alternative.

I do recommend that anyone interested in Lewis's life read this book, because Wilson does cover many aspects of Lewis's life the others do not. But it most definitely needs to be supplemented with other biographies. Although it has its own problems, probably the best of a bad lot is Sayer's JACK: A LIFE OF C. S. LEWIS. His is a mildly sanitized biography, but the value of the book is that Lewis does begin to emerge as a three-dimensional person. Read the Wilson biography, but then read the Sayer as a corrective to Wilson's corrective.

There is great, though, as it turns out, pointless, irony in the fact that the English litterateur A. N. Wilson penned this life of a famous Christian apologist while he was in the process of giving up his own Christian faith. One might anticipate from such a juxtaposition some unusual insight into Lewis' (in this case unsuccessful) methods of argumentation. Alas, nothing of the sort occurs. This is simply another Lewis biography, following the familiar outline laid down by Lewis' own "Surprised by Joy" and adding very little, save for catty psychological guesswork, that has not appeared in earlier productions of the prolific Lewis "industry".

The book's great sensation is the assertion that the young Lewis, at around age 20, had an affair with Mrs. Jane Moore, the woman whom he "adopted" as a mother figure for the rest of his life. The theory lacks both plausibility and evidence. Lewis had lost his mother at a young age and had chafed under his father's well-meant but wrong-headed tutelage. Mrs. Moore's son, for a while Lewis' closest friend, had died in the Great War. That the two should have formed a substitute family is not at all surprising. Wilson offers no grounds for supposing that any sexual undertones were present. The kind of "evidence" that he gathers demonstrates little. To take one telling item, he points to the fact that Lewis' diaries use the Greek letter delta (our "D") as shorthand for Mrs. Moore. Of the many Greek words and names beginning with that letter, he singles out "Diotimia", the courtesan who introduced Socrates to eros. That is just a wild guess, evidently made without knowledge of the fact that delta is the first letter of the Greek transliteration of "Jane". (Our "j" sound is not native to the language but can be represented by the diphthong delta-zeta.)

Wilson's major weakness as a biographer is not, however, his dubiously supported bursts of malice but rather his incurious, intellectually lazy approach to a field where he has a number of predecessors. A life that looked at Lewis from a different angle, that, for instance, probed his pre-Christian philosophical opinions and asked to what extent they truly changed as a result of his conversion or that placed his apologetics next to the works (Wells, Huxley, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin et al.) against which he was reacting or that gave adequate attention to his professional literary interests, could have been a fresh and vivid portrait. One that accepts prior interpretations with a few unflattering twists is not.

There is no point in writing a biography simply in order to say what has been said before - not even if one says it with slightly more elegance and now and then taxes the subject for his failure to anticipate politically correct points of view. As a compendium of bare facts, sprinkled with factoids, Wilson's book is acceptable, but it is hard to imagine a reason for anybody to seek it out.

Some of the reviews here are quite disturbing. Lewis in the dock? Filth? - Those people must be talking about a different book, surely. Wilson clearly admires Lewis and loves and knows his works. Most of the claims attributed to his biography by other reviewers are not actually made in the book. It seems to me that many people find it hard to accept that Lewis's lifestyle differed from the one accepted among American Evangelicals... Wilson never accuses Lewis of not being politically correct, on the contrary, he points to the times he lived in to make us understand. It's a pity many fans of Lewis will be deterred from reading this book by some of the other reviews here; this is a fair and compassionate biography which helps the reader understand Lewis and his world; above all, however, it is excellently written, and I found it hard to put it down once I had got started.

A. N. Wilson, who never met Lewis, wants to save him from sainthood, and feels that previous biographers have been too adulatory. I suspect he also feels that Lewis is only properly understood by fellow literati. He wants to balance things up, and I happily admit that there is merit in this aim. Unfortunately, the merit is far outweighed by the demerits of his method and the factual inaccuracy of this book. I am strongly reminded of the position in which John Betjeman's biographer, Bevis Hillier found himself. He tells us that he decided to avoid producing a `critical biography', which is an illegitimate art-form, as it `yokes together historical narrative and literary criticism'. This is Wilson's error, and he compounds it with his own repetitious and subjective brand of psychoanalysis. It is as if he cannot restrict himself to any one role, or even a coherent set of roles. He wants to be an honest broker, iconoclast, Devil's Advocate, psychoanalyst, literary critic, and historian by turns. He fails.

To me it seems that Wilson's best remarks are made when he is in literary-critical mode. I can actually recognise Lewis's book `The Allegory of Love' from the description given. However, Wilson's fatal habit cannot help but ruin it by the addition of a florid Freudian excursus at the end. Against this slight virtue, the Lewis I know from his autobiography, diaries, and other biographies appears as a caricature.

George Sayer wrote a biography of Lewis entitled `Jack': he was a pupil of Lewis, and a good friend. As this friendship lasted twenty-nine years, he was a hundred times more qualified than Wilson to write a biography. Sayer was so stung by the unfairness of Wilson's book that he responded with an updated introduction to his own biography. Although Sayer does not baulk at concluding that the pre-Christian Lewis and Mrs Moore were indeed lovers, he does defend him against Wilson calumnies in foursquare style. As a Christian Lewis was not known to drink heavily; he did not encourage others to drink too much; Wilson does not have taped testimony from Douglas Gresham about Lewis's bedroom behaviour with Joy Davidman, etc. In short, if the Christian Lewis (he converted around the age of thirty) were half as bad as Wilson makes out, his reputation would have been poor long before this biographer set poison pen to paper. Insinuation and semi-attributable quotation is hard to refute simply. But then strong claims require strong proof, and he simply fails to produce it.

For myself I will rest content with refuting four errors on the first page of Wilson's preface. He says that the Narnia books are in a `rough hewn style'. I think he is the first to discover this in fifty years - is there a rough-hewn chapter or page in them? He says that Lewis `did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people'. I suppose JRR Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), John Betjeman (Poet Laureate), Sir Peter Medawar (Nobel prize, biology), and Billy Graham, are not meant to count. He says that Lewis was `deliberately at variance with the twentieth century'. But if he could only make a case that Lewis would have actually agreed with lies, sexual immorality, injustice, subjectivism, Marxism, and liberal theology in any other century this might be a point worth making. Finally, he says that `religions have collapsed' in the twentieth century. He fails to notice the rise of the modern `supermarket' approach to spiritual things - Feng Shui, Star Wars, the Pentecostal/charismatic movement, house churches, `New Age' paganism, the Bahai faith, and the many cults that pop up like mushrooms. Far from dying out, it's a free-market `pick your own' situation now. He should exit left pursued by a bear.

Until recently, I had, like many other fans of C.S. Lewis, a very negative impression of Wilson's biography of him. That impression was based largely on discussions I had had with other Lewis fans on the Internet and on criticisms of Wilson coming from other Lewis biographers. I had heard that Wilson had lost his faith while writing Lewis's biography, and I thought that there was, therefore, not much chance of him presenting a sympathetic account of Lewis or of Christianity. A few months ago, I saw that this new printing of the book was to be released and was hopeful it would be a revised edition. When I discovered that it wasn't, I decided to buy and read it anyway and judge Wilson's work for myself.

As you can see by the rating I gave it, my verdict was quite positive. It is impossible to maintain, however, that the book is not seriously flawed. There are inaccuracies that have been catalogued by others. Wilson sometimes criticizes Lewis and his work in a way that strikes me as unfairly harsh. He also often seems inconsistent. As a small example, on p. 150 he characterizes the likening of Charles Williams' appearance to that of a monkey as "unkind", while on p. 170 Wilson is himself applying the word "simian" to Williams. There is occasionally a disjointedness to the text, as if Wilson sometimes forgot what he had written earlier in the book. Anecdotes or quotes are sometimes presented for the second time as if it were for the first.

Despite all that, I greatly enjoyed reading this book. Perhaps Wilson doesn't write as well as Lewis, but he nevertheless writes very well. Wilson's alleged turn to agnosticism was, for me, not evident in his writing. (Whatever antireligious views he may have developed are certainly not as intrusive as, say, those of Richard Marius in his biographies of Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther.) The fact that Wilson is not as deferential to Lewis as are some of his other biographers brought, for me, a certain genuineness to those moments, not a few, when he expressed a high regard for Lewis and his writings. It is a pleasure to read someone with Wilson's eloquence write about some of my favorite books with sincere appreciation.

Wilson is often blunt and opinionated, and sometimes simply wrong. For me as a reader, that was a price worth paying. I come away from _C.S. Lewis: A Biography_ with a greater understanding and an even greater admiration for Lewis than I had before.

This was, unfortunately, the first biography on Lewis that I read (apart from Lewis's own Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed) some eight years ago. I naively bought it in a second-hand shop and read it uncritically. Only years later did I realize how spurious Wilson's research and misleading his conclusions were. While this book is hailed as being a more honest and forthright account of Lewis, especially in his humanity and less than evangelical-approved habits (i.e. smoking, drinking, and bawdy humor), this book is really the dashing of several myths about Lewis that only a few people have believed, but the dashing of which make Christians look stupid, C. S. Lewis look confused, and Wilson look good, allowing him to reconstruct Lewis via Freudian psychoanalysis. Kathryn Lindskoog's Light in the Shadow Lands: Protecting the Real C. S. Lewis, Appendix 4, gives a fine and even-handed critique of Wilson's biography (with careful documentation of his errors) and helped set my thinking and reading straight. A far better biography of Lewis is George Sayer's Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis. The Lewis I read about in Sayer's biography resonated with the man I have discovered myself in Lewis's own writings - a very human man, to be sure, but a man who was filled with the love of Christ.

This biography is highly recommended for devotees of CS Lewis's works, particularly of his Christian apologetics, even though the work has some serious shortcomings that threaten to distract from its real value.

In most aspects as biography, Wilson's description and analysis of Lewis and the events that shaped him ring true : the tragedy of his mother's death, the difficult relationship with his father (and the subsequent guilt for Lewis's treating him so shabbily), his salient encounter with the writings of George Macdonald and of G.K. Chesterton; his friendship with fellow Christians--particularly J.R.R. Tolkien, the strange affair with an older woman, the debate that led Lewis to write the Narnia series. In addition, as a literary man, Wilson seems supremely well qualified to speak of Lewis as a man of letters, literary critic, sometime poet, and storyteller. Indeed, Wilson whetted my appetite for Lewis's works that I have put off reading, such as `A Prelude to Paradise Lost,' `Studies in Words,' the Oxford History of English Literature, and `The Allegory of Love'; for all this I am grateful to Wilson.

But there are things--admittedly secondary, unimportant things--about this biography that occasionally make one want to throw it out the window. There is the frequent gratuitous or unsubstantiated remark that grates: the comparison in the preface of Malcolm Muggeridge's typewriter, displayed under glass at Wheaton College, to `the body of Lenin'; details from Lewis's childhood that are `too specifically recalled' in his autobiography to be authentic; Lewis's disdain for modern writers as `ideological' (Screwtape would have liked that one!); marriage not recognized as a sacrament until the medieval western church said so; and, in a total non sequitur, an unkind remark about a woman in `The Screwtape Letters' that is made to apply to Lewis's wife 15 years later. In these cases, Wilson is merely exasperating.

There are two more serious instances where Wilson is almost unforgivable. He spends most of five pages attacking Lewis's clear explanation in `The Problem of Pain' of the choice presented by Christ regarding Who He Is. By focusing inappropriately on what Gospel `records' might mean, he describes Lewis's profound, succinct, and inspiring witness as the work of `a rhetorical trickster who is not thinking at all.' Hardly--it's just that Wilson is offended by the argument. Ironically, Wilson ends that section with an excellent description of the `purely irrational intellectual snobbery' that undermined Christianity in England at that time--and still does, come to think of it, but in Europe and America as well.

In the second instance, Wilson goes on and on about a blunt comparison Lewis made regarding the Incarnation: to a radio audience he suggested imagining becoming a slug or a crab. Lewis, of course, was making a point about Divine Condescension; Wilson seizes on the figure of speech as `offensive' and `bad theology.' Wilson is a clever man, but he might consider that, as a theologian he is rather like a slug compared to Lewis.

Despite the shortcomings, and now you're ready for them, this is a worthwhile book, and may serve to inspire Christians more than Wilson intended or imagined.

The life of C. S. Lewis proves that fact is stranger than fiction. I think it would be nearly impossible for a novelist to create a more interesting and unusual story of a life of such variety, intellectual achievement, and an unusual and unique personal lifestyle.
A. N. Wilson, an established biographer and novelist, has brought Jack Lewis to life. From the death of his mother, his unusual and interesting education prior to entering Oxford, his relationship with his father, his brother Warnie, his service in WW I, his attachment to the family of an army buddy, his friendship with J. R. R. Tolkien, his religious conversion, his literary achievements, and his relationship that inspired the movie "Shadowlands" starring Anthony Hopkins and Debra Winger, the story is fascinating from beginning to end.
I have read this book twice, and I have found it invaluable in understanding the author and the man. It also has contributed significantly to my enjoyment and understanding of the works of C. S. Lewis.

Despite a vast amount of literature on C. S. Lewis, there are surprisingly a dearth of good biographies. In most, Lewis emerges as a bit of a plastic saint, just a little too good to be true, a bit of a high-church protestant saint. This is especially true in evangelical American circles, where many imagine Lewis to have been a nonsmoking abstainer from alcohol. Many will react with shock and dismay upon learning that Lewis's smoked so heavily that he was the probable cause of his relatively early death and his drinking was considerable, and may have bordered on the alcoholic.

As a corrective to this goody-goody Lewis, Wilson provides us with a warts and all flesh-and-blood corrective. He gives us the hard drinking, mildly bawdy, addictive smoker who has a relationship with a woman old enough to be his mother and a premarital relationship with a woman he would later marry.

There are two questions to ask here. First, are Wilson's "facts" accurate? There doesn't seem to be much reason to doubt many of them. Second, are these adequate to create a good biography? No. Wilson's biography is valuable for one and only one reason: he delves into the aspects of Lewis's life that the other biographers would prefer to either ignore or pretend didn't exist. He also gives a slightly different slant on many of Lewis's intellectual and religious interests. But apart from the book's valuable debunking, it is a fairly lame biography. Lewis doesn't emerge as a particularly attractive person. He doesn't, in fact, emerge much as a person at all. Wilson doesn't doo much of a job of showing what made Lewis click at all. And while he does do a good job of showing that the St. Jack portraits of Lewis are all mildly bogus, he doesn't really provide us with an alternative.

I do recommend that anyone interested in Lewis's life read this book, because Wilson does cover many aspects of Lewis's life the others do not. But it most definitely needs to be supplemented with other biographies. Although it has its own problems, probably the best of a bad lot is Sayer's JACK: A LIFE OF C. S. LEWIS. His is a mildly sanitized biography, but the value of the book is that Lewis does begin to emerge as a three-dimensional person. Read the Wilson biography, but then read the Sayer as a corrective to Wilson's corrective.