This is a biography of C.S. Lewis, the well-known British writer best known for his children’s book “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”. That volume, now considered a classic in children’s literature, is one of a series of six fantasy stories which became known as the Narnia Chronicles, published in 1950. However, Lewis did just write children’s stories. He was a literary scholar who wrote book reports, academic articles and many other non-fiction books. In this volume, Michael White does not present Lewis’ life as a linear story but builds a picture of the man in separate chapters, exploring his life under a number of subject headings.
Lewis was born in 1898 in Dublin Ireland, the son of Albert a lawyer and his wife Flora who died in 1908 of cancer when Lewis was only nine years old. Lewis experienced a difficult childhood growing up, seeing his father as distant and demanding, although he did have a warm relationship with his older brother Warren. His unhappy childhood led him to seek comfort in books and a fictional world he created for himself, a world that became the inspiration for the Narnia books.
Lewis was considered a bohemian by his academic peers at Oxford where he held positions in English literature and was often viewed as arrogant by his fellow professors and students. However, White does not devote much time or space to his academic life, choosing to focus more on his unconventional domestic life.
During Lewis’s army training, he developed a close friendship with his roommate Paddy who was killed in World War I. Paddy’s mother Janie was a widow with one other child, a girl named Maureen, Paddy’s sister. Lewis first met Jane when he was eighteen and she was forty-five and he moved in with her and Maureen. It is not clear if Lewis and Janie shared a sexual relationship, although many believed they did. Nevertheless, despite their age difference, they were happy together and remained so for thirty years until Janie died from cancer.
When Lewis was in middle age, he met and fell in love with Joy Gresham, an American divorcee who he believed was his intellectual equal. He married her and adopted her two sons, but she died three years later, also of cancer.
White describes Lewis’s friendship with J.R. Tolkien, who he first met as a fellow academic at Oxford. It was his conversations with Tolkien which led Lewis to reconsider his religion. Lewis had been raised in a religious family and regularly attended the Church of Ireland with his family. However, at the age of fifteen he began to see religion more as a chore and a duty, and that combined with his increasing interest in the occult and fantasy, influenced his decision to embrace atheism. Lewis and Tolkien were close friends for several years and White alludes to what may have happened to their friendship which deteriorated in later years.
This is a well-researched biography which presents an interesting read of a complex man with a powerful imagination. Although not especially inclined to like children, he wrote one of the best loved children’s books of all time, still popular today.