Customer Reviews

Chad Walsh Reviews C. S. Lewis

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Chad Walsh Reviews C.S. Lewis With a memoir by Damaris Walsh McGuire Compiled with an introduction by Joe R. Christopher. Altadena, California, The Mythopoeic Press, 1998 ISBN 1-887726-05-5, pb, 52 pp., $4.95

If C.S. Lewis was indeed `apostle to the skeptics', as Chad Walsh once wrote of him, then Walsh was his first American disciple. The Beloit College professor's 1946 Atlantic Monthly essay thus headlined, later reprinted a year later in Reader's Digest, certainly gave many Stateside readers their initialt inkling of the writing of C.S. Lewis. Later the writer would expand the article into a book so titled, the first on Lewis. This slim book is hardly slight, nor to be slighted. Its twenty reviews, most first published in The New York Times Book Review, show a thoughtful and sympathetic reader's first response to everything from the gradual revelation of the Chronicles of Narnia to a complex appreciation of the autobiography Surprised by Joy seasoned by a friendship of a dozen years. Of special interest are two reviews of Till We Have Faces, one from The New York Herald Tribune Book Review and a more reasoned, reflective piece done later for Marquette University's journal Renascence. In the latter, reacting to the "bewilderment and frustration" this novel caused some longtime Lewis devotees, Walsh calls this Lewis' "most difficult" book and concludes by suggesting "...its quality...resembles G.K. Chesterton less and Charles Williams more than any of the author's previous work. Perhaps it is true that all religious insight, as it grows as deepens, moves toward music, liturgy, or silence. The prose writer finds the words bending and breaking with the burden they must carry. Lewis has not reached that point, but Till We Have Faces represents a far stride toward a direct perception of the love that moves the sun and the other stars." (20) While many reviews are but three paragraphs, Walsh packs a lot into them. His reviews of Narnia are informed by reading them to his four daughters as they grow. One hitherto unpublished review, a corrected typescript on Letters to an American Lady from the Wade Center at Wheaton College, adds to the value of the trove. Daughter Damaris Walsh McGuire's introduction "Memories of Joy, Jack, and Chad" is a charming memoir of her father's friendship with Lewis. Walsh, we learn, first suggested Joy Davidman write Lewis directly. In 1955, when the Walsh family visited Lewis and Joy in Oxford, Damaris writes that after a golden afternoon of charades in the Magdalen College deer park "my wise and observant mother [said] `I smell a marriage.' She was right." (xvii) Joe R. Christopher's foreword is a lucid, succinct summary of the similarities--both poets, both deeply religious men who had rejected Christianity as boys--and the differences--Walsh was liberal and political, Lewis was neither--between the two unlikely friends. Indeed, Christopher's short critical biography of Walsh will send some readers to the challenging but rewarding task of seeking out Walsh's superb poetry, such as the stark 1970 elegy "Kent" and The Psalm of Christ, forty Lenten poems, one on each verse of Ps. 22. Quibble: the exact date of these reviews' original publication might be of interest to some Lewis analysts. But that mite of a quibble aside, this small (52 pp., four by six inches) but lively book fits easily in pocket or purse (I'm a pocket kind of guy, myself) and sheds light on Lewis, including the illumination of a little girl who saw him do a charade enacting a bullfinch. No reader of Lewis should lack it.

--reviewed by Mike Foster

(To order, send ($4.95 plus $1 S&H) payable to the Mythopoeic Society to: Joan Marie Verba, PO Box 1363, Minnetonka, MN, 55345-0363)