Book Review

Attracted to dark forces

The Narnian: the life and imagination of C.S. Lewis

Two irresistible attachments of the heart dominated the greater part of C.S. Lewis’ life. For 30 years, Jack Lewis, as his family knew him, lived with Janie Moore, the mother of a friend killed in the First World War. In his last years he found that, in the words of Alan Jacobs, “he had become an American divorcee’s sugar-daddy”.

Yet this was the man who had declared, “There’s no sound I like better than adult male laughter”, and whose “ideal happiness would be to read the [Renaissance] Italian epics – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated at a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours a day.”

How much Mrs Moore was a mother-substitute (his own having died when he was nine), and how much an object of sexual attraction, no one can tell. On her death in 1951, Lewis’s elder brother, Warnie, wrote in his diary of “the mysterious self-imposed slavery in which Jack has lived”. Certainly for Lewis the Christian (after his conversion in the early 1930s), Mrs Moore was a burden, a Cross. “Her conversation was chiefly about herself and was otherwise a matter of ill-informed dogmatism,” Lewis admitted. To an Anglican nun he wrote of her in 1941 as “an unbeliever, ill, old, frightened, full of charity in the sense of alms, but full of uncharity in the other senses”.

Within three years of her death, Lewis was married – at first in a civil ceremony – to Joy Gresham, a New Yorker, still in her thirties. She had deliberately pursued him, but Warnie liked her, and she made Jack happy. Soon he was paying the rent and her two sons’ school fees, and was planning for her to move in. That was even before the drama of her illness and remission from cancer. Lewis married her in a religious ceremony in her hospital room – in considered defiance of his bishop. But, Lewis reasoned, since her first husband had married before, she remained free to marry. On her almost miraculous recovery, they lived together and, in Lewis’s improbable words, “no cranny of heart or body remained unsatisfied”.

This all seems a long way from the “Chronicles of Narnia” to which Alan Jacobs, the American author, links his biography. Happily, Narnia is not dragged in by the heels at every turn, and Jacobs’ judgement on these and Lewis’ dozens of other books is generally interesting and sound.

He notes that in 1949, the year when the imaginative outburst of the seven children’s books began, Lewis was at a low ebb. He was flu-ridden, overworked, taxed by Mrs Moore, who called out “Baw-boys!” (her nickname for him) every five minutes as he tried to work, to give him some trivial task. Their two housemaids suffered from mental illness and Warnie, a binge-alcoholic, would sit for days in a chair surrounded by bottles of whisky.

Narnia does reflect an aspect of Lewis’ mind much more attractive than the dark alternative to which he was drawn – before his conversion and ever after. In his last years, as he mourned for Joy, he was tempted to see God as the “cosmic vivisector”, a sadistic persecutor of little humans. Lewis had from childhood tended to sadism – at Oxford he once got so drunk at a party that he offered a shilling to anyone who’d let him cane them.

In his teens Lewis had made God in this sadistic image. His first volume of poetry, Spirits in Bondage, is a work of Promethean anti-theism in the line of Shelley, inveighing against “whatever brute and blackguard made the world”. A typical sentiment from Lewis’s pen during the First World War is, “The good is dead. Let us curse God most High.”

And then, a curious statement Lewis made long after his conversion is that “next to Christianity, Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market”. He means a belief that evil has its own deity, against whom brave souls heroically fight. In the Norse myths he loved, a bad end awaits both heroes and gods. This dualist tendency explains why Lewis was so struck by a “science-fiction” book called by David Lindsay, published in 1929. For Lewis its power was in its assertion, no matter how incoherent, that the beauties of the cosmos are made by an evil god.

Jacobs does not go into the Arcturus aspect of Lewis’s imagination (having enough ground to cover already), but only by realising how enduring was the pull of dark forces in Lewis’s life can one appreciate the sun of Narnia. Although Philip Pullman hates Narnia, Lewis would have been horribly fascinated by Pullman’s other worlds.

Lewis’ own hunger for something other-worldly – which he called Joy (long before meeting his American love) – is not in itself sufficient explanation of his Christian convictions. Lewis shared the yearning, Sehnsucht, for the “blue flower” in the German Romantic tale by Novalis, but that does not lead to Christianity. In fact it overlapped with a fascination with magic and spiritualism (which he promised Joy not to touch). Yet Lewis’s use in his Narnia books of a lumber-room of mythical elements follow from a conviction that myth does have a firm place in Christianity.

On 19 September 1931, Lewis talked into the early hours with his fellow don J.R.R. Tolkien and Hugo Dyson, from Reading University. By 4 a.m., Lewis realised that “the idea of the dying and reviving God (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) moved me, provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels.” Yet “the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with the tremendous difference that <>it really happened.”

Lewis suggests that as for the credal formulations of Christianity, these doctrines “God has already expressed in a language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion and resurrection”. In invented Narnia, Aslan’s death and resurrection convey a similar myth. It is no surprise Lewis was against “demythologising” Christianity.

Altogether Alan Jacobs’ biography is readable and less fanciful than A.N. Wilson’s. Jacobs can’t quite get things like fellowships and scholarships right, and he repeatedly claims Lewis was antipathetic to Anglo-Catholicism, though he regarded an Anglican nun as his spiritual mother and took Fr Walter Adams as a confessor.

To (Roman) Catholicism, Lewis was less sympathetic. Tolkien hated the anti-Catholicism of the Oxford History of English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (where Lewis always calls Catholics “papists”) he thought Lewis’ Letters to Malcolm “distressing and in parts horrifying”. But an interesting detail is Lewis’ correspondence, in Latin, on ecumenical hopes, with Don Giovanni Calabria, who died in 1953. Jacobs notes he was beatified; in 1999 he was canonised

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