This review first appeared in Christianity
and Literature 50 (Summer 2001): 750-755.
C. S. Lewis,
Collected Letters: Volume I, Family
Letters, 1903-1931. Edited by Walter Hooper.
In
what promises to be his last major effort at advancing studies on C. S. Lewis,
Walter Hooper offers in C. S. Lewis, Collected Letters: Volume I, Family Letters, 1903-1931, the
first of a planned three volume set of the Oxford don’s and Cambridge
professor’s collected correspondence.
That the entire set will not be the complete letters is
regrettable, but given the reticence of publishers to invest in such an effort,
we should be grateful to Hooper for what he has been
able to publish. Knowledgeable readers
will quickly see that Volume I is comprised primarily of letters
previously published in Letters of C. S.
Lewis, edited by Warren Lewis (revised edition edited by Walter
Hooper.
While the earliest
letters are predictably filled with grammatical conundrums and misspellings,
more importantly they overflow with discussions regarding the imaginary world,
Boxen, Lewis and his brother, Warren, were excitedly yet consciously
creating. For instance, Lewis writes
Lewis’ closeness to his brother, a deep
affection he maintained throughout his life, is also evident in these early
letters. Their reliance on each other is
often revealed in conspiratorial passages where the two work to keep their
father, Albert, oblivious to their schemes.
In November, 1913, while at Malvern College, Lewis responds to a letter
from Warren in which he suggests they collude to travel home together to
Belfast at the next holiday (Warren was in Surrey at this time being tutored by
W. T. Kirkpatrick, later Lewis’ most important teacher): “Although always quite ready to fall in with
your wishes whenever they are within the bounds of possibility, I always like
to point out some of the more glaring absurdities in the same. It has not occurred to you that this
simultaneous attack on the paternal purse will savour somewhat too much of
preparation” (36). Lewis then reproduces
for Warren a paragraph he has composed and plans to send their father in which
he cleverly suggests all the advantages there would be for the two boys to
travel together; Lewis adds that this paragraph will come at “the end of a long
and cheerful letter, when he [Albert] will be bucked up” (36).
The sense of conspiracy the two boys had
regarding their father lasted until his death on September 25, 1929, and had
its genesis, according to Lewis, after the death of his mother in 1908. In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis notes that his father’s grief over the death of his wife had
the unfortunate effect of driving a wedge between him and his sons:
Under the pressure of anxiety his temper became incalculable; he spoke
wildly and acted unjustly. Thus by a
peculiar cruelty of fate, during those months the unfortunate man, had he but
known it, was really losing his sons as well as his wife. We were coming, my brother and I, to rely
more and more exclusively on each other for all that made life bearable; to
have confidence only in each other. I
expect that we (or at any rate I) were already learning to lie to him. (SJ, 19)
Lewis’ letters about Albert consistently illustrate condescension at
best or contempt at worst. Indeed,
Lewis’ poor opinion of his father becomes tiresome, particularly since at that
time Lewis himself was living as a hypocrite; that is, until at least 1925 when
finally secured a position as tutor at Magdalen College, Oxford, he was
accepting money from his father, at least in part to support Mrs. Janie Moore and
her daughter, Maureen, a detail Lewis connived to keep from his father. After his father’s death, however, Lewis’
tone changes radically. Left alone to
handle Albert’s estate since
As time goes on the thing that emerges is that, whatever else he was,
he was a terrific personality. . . How he filled a room! How hard it was to realize that physically he
was not a very big man. Our whole world,
the whole Pigiebotian [a euphemism the boys developed to refer to oddities they
connected to Albert’s behavior] world, is either direct or indirect testimony
to the same effect. Take away from our
conversation all that is imitation or parody (sincerest witness in the world)
of his, and how little is left. The way we enjoyed going to Leeborough [their
home in
Lewis’ later shame over his behavior toward his father also comes out
in a letter to Greeves when he “remembered how abominably I had treated my
father” (Lewis emphasis; 903, June 7, 1930).
Lewis’ correspondence
with Greeves is fascinating as we see him exploring a multitude of topics,
engaging in lively debates, and reflecting on what he is learning. In particular, the letters provide insight
into his aesthetic, sexual, and spiritual development. For instance, in letter after letter he
writes about his love of books, both as examples of great literature and as
objects themselves; other letters reveal his deep affection for nature, especially
landscapes; still others focus upon his growing love of great music, with
Wagner being a special favorite. Most
notable, perhaps, is how these early letters reveal his deep affection for
poetry and his conscious efforts to write great poetry. In a letter dated July 11, 1916, Lewis
writes: “I thought a person like you
would sooner or later come to like poetry . . . Poetry makes use of . . .
feeling much more than prose and produces those effects by metre as well as by
phrase. In fact, the metre and the magic
of words should be like the orchestration of a Wagnerian opera—should sort of
fill the matter by expressing things that can’t be directly told”
(209-10). Later that year he confides to
Greeves: “I am at present engaged in
making huge plans both for prose and verse none of which I shall try. I begin to see that short, slight stories
& poems are all I am fit for at present & that it would be better to
write & finish one of such than to begin & leave twenty ambitious
epic-poems or romances” (228; Oct. 4, 1916).
Lewis and Greeves also
wrote to each other about their sexual fantasies. While this will makes some readers
uncomfortable, as a young man Lewis had at least a brief fixation on
sadism. He writes Greeves on June 3,
1917: “I hope you are right as to the
possibilities of my finding my particular kind of love. [Another student] tells me that the person to
read on my subject is a Frenchman of the 17th century called the
Visconte de sade: his books, however, are very hard to
come by” (313). Even more unsavory is a
line from a letter he writes one week later:
“I am afraid I must have given myself away rather as I went round
imploring everyone to let me whip them for the sum of 1s.
a lash!” (319). Although Lewis’ interest in sadism is
disturbing, it is clear from later letters this was a passing fancy and not a
lifelong addiction.
Lewis’ letters about
God illustrate his movement from being a pompous, sophisticated, religious
know-it-all to a broken, humbled, spiritual seeker. For example, in an early letter to Greeves
the eighteen-year old Lewis writes:
You ask me my religious views: you know, I think, that I believe in no religion. There’s absolutely no proof for any of them, and from a philosophical standpoint Christianity is not even the best. All religions, that is all mythologies to give them their proper name are merely man’s own invention—Christ as much as Loki. . . . Often, too, great men were regarded as gods after their death—such as Heracles or Odin: thus after the death of a Hebrew philosopher Yeshua (whose name we have corrupted into Jesus) he became regarded as a god, a cult sprang up, which was afterwards connected with the ancient Hebrew Jahweh-worship, and so Christianity came into being—one mythology among many, but the one that we happen to have been brought up in. . . . Now all this you must have heard before: it is the recognised scientific account of the growth of religions. Superstition of course in every age has held the common people, but in every age the educated and thinking ones have stood outside it, though usually outwardly conceding to it for convenience. . . . I must only add that ones views on religious subjects don’t make any difference in morals, of course. A good member of society must of course try to be honest, chaste, truthful, kindly etc: these are things we owe to our own manhood & dignity and not to any imagined god or gods. (230-31; October 12, 1916)
Twelve years later, however, with World War
I battlefield service, intensive study as an
Things are going
very, very well with me (spiritually).
On the other hand, one know from bitter experience that he who standeth
should take heed lest he fall, and that anything remotely like pride is certain
to bring an awful crash. The old
doctrine is quite true you know—that one must attribute everything to the grace
of God, and nothing to oneself. Yet as
long as one is a conceited ass, there is no good pretending not to
be. My self satisfaction cannot be hidden
from God . . . [but] Pride [is] my besetting sin . . . During my
afternoon meditations . . . I have found out ludicrous and terrible things
about my own character. Sitting by,
watching the rising thoughts to break their necks as they pop up, one learns to
know the sort of thoughts that do come.
And, will you believe it, one out of every three is a thought of
self-admiration: when everything else
fails, having had its neck broken, up comes the thought “What an admirable
fellow I am to have broken their necks!”
I catch myself posturing before the mirror, so to speak, all day
long. I pretend I am carefully thinking
out what to say to the next pupil (for his good, of course) and then
suddenly realise I am really thinking how frightfully clever I’m going to be
and how he will admire me. I pretend I
am remembering an evening of good fellowship in a really friendly and
charitable spirit—and all the time I’m really remembering how good a fellow I am and how well I talked. And then when you force yourself to stop it,
you admire yourself for doing that.
It’s like fighting the hydra ( you remember,
when you cut off one head another grew).
There seems to be no end to it. Depth under depth of self-love and self admiration. (emphasis Lewis;
877, 878)
In February 1930 he feels the Hound of
Heaven drawing nearer when he writes Owen Barfield: “Terrible things are happening to me. The ‘Spirit’ of ‘Real I’ is showing an
alarming tendency to become much more personal and is taking the offensive, and
behaving just like God. You’d better
come on Monday at the latest or I may have entered a monastery” (882-83).
Lewis movement to faith in Christ is amplified in three particular letters he writes to Greeves. On December 24, 1930 Lewis writes: “I think the trouble with me is lack of faith. I have no rational ground for going back on the arguments that convinced me of God’s existence: but the irrational deadweight of my old sceptical habits, and the spirit of this age, and the cares of the day, steal away all my lively feeling of the truth, and often when I pray I wonder if I am not posting letters to a non-existent address” (emphasis Lewis; 944-45). On October 1, 1931 he adds: “I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ—in Christianity. I will try to explain this another time. My long night talk with [Hugo] Dyson and [J. R. R.] Tolkien had a good deal to do with it” (974). All this culminates in his letter of October 18, 1931:
What has been holding me back . . . has not been so much a difficulty in believing as a difficulty in knowing what the doctrine [of the incarnation] meant: you can’t believe a thing while you are ignorant what the thing is. My puzzle was the whole doctrine of Redemption: in what sense the life and death of Christ “saved” or “opened salvation to” the whole world. . . What I couldn’t see was how the life and death of Someone Else (whoever he was) 2000 years ago could help us here and now . . . Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . . I like it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in the Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose “what it meant.” Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e. the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call “real things” . . . Does this amount to a belief in Christianity? At any rate I am now certain (a) That this Christian story is to be approached, in a sense, as I approach the other myths. (b) That it is the most important and full of meaning. I am also nearly certain that it really happened. (emphasis Lewis; 976-77).
Simply put, without these letters we would have no way of tracing Lewis’ movement from atheist to agnostic to theist to Christian since Surprised by Joy only quick sketches his conversion. If for no other reason, these letters make Volume I required reading.
In addition to the letters, Hooper
provides extensive footnotes in which he thoroughly explains passing references
to people, places, books, and ideas.
Also invaluable are a “Biographical Appendix” of forty-seven pages and
an exceptional detailed index. Volume
I is a book that rewards both the Lewis scholar and general reader. I, for one, eagerly await the publication of
the final two volumes; I’m sure the wait will be worth it.