CS Lewis’s great fame and the nature of some of his ideas have attracted over-zealous praise, even discipleship, at one end of the scale while at the other they have drawn opprobrium.
Most of his original manuscripts are now kept in a permanent exhibition dedicated to him and other religious apologists in the Marion E Wade Center, at Wheaton College, Illinois. The college — Billy Graham, the evangelist, is among its alumni — also possesses a wardrobe from Lewis’s house, purported to be the one that inspired his most famous book, and a table from the kitchen of The Kilns.
Wheaton College is run by and for conservative Christians, who revere Lewis as a religious commentator first and as an author second. This adulation is based on confusion and misinterpretation.
Lewis was an old-fashioned Christian, and those who consider the church to be too interested in modernising see him as a hero of religious orthodoxy and conservative values. This would be harmless except for the fact that they have managed to morph the real Jack Lewis into “St Jack of Oxford”, a version of himself he would have had trouble recognising. The puritans of America (a breed Lewis always loathed) have even tried to eradicate all references to alcohol and tobacco in his writing.
Lewis loved a drink, he loved to smoke and he continued to enjoy his cigarettes when his doctors told him that they would hasten his death. For more than 40 years he smoked 60 a day between pipes. He actively disliked non-smokers and merrily mocked teetotallers.
And then there was sex. As a youth Lewis revelled in vivid and cruel fantasies. He also loved bawdy songs and ancient poetry bordering on the pornographic. As an adult he had sex with at least one woman. Nonetheless, the evangelists who collect his furniture and place it in glass cases — and the Lewis societies that work hard to project a fabricated image of the writer in England and elsewhere — have tried to remould him as a “perpetual virgin”. They believe that he died without ever having engaged in sexual intercourse and that therefore his late marriage to Joy Gresham was never consummated.
Yet at least two of those who knew Lewis well, Gresham’s brother Dr Howard Davidman, and Maureen Moore, daughter of the woman he lived with for 30 years, have lent weight to the notion that he certainly did not die a virgin.
Lewis himself wrote of his sexual relationship with Gresham. In his most honest book, A Grief Observed — he wrote it under a pseudonym near the end of his life and it did not appear under his own name until he was dead — he details the fact that they fell in love and that they satisfied their long sexual hunger.
Earlier, Lewis had implied in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, that he had also at one time enjoyed a sexual relationship with Janie Moore, but his readers had to work hard to understand what he was getting at. “One huge and complex episode will be omitted,” he wrote opaquely. “I have no choice about this reticence. All I can or need to say is that my earlier hostility to the emotions was very fully and variously avenged.”
There were reasons for being so dry and unrevealing. By the time he was reworking the final draft of the autobiography in 1955 Gresham was already looking over his shoulder and sharing every word with him. He could not have written the plain truth about his relationship with Moore, his earliest sexual feelings or his most personal drives and motivations even if he had been able to overcome his own deep-rooted inhibitions.
Furthermore, the very fact that his name was synonymous with religiosity and strict Christian morals meant he could not write a book in which he revealed anything about his intimate life. As a prominent Christian, he could not possibly admit to having broken the church’s ban on sex outside marriage. And British society in the 1950s was not ready for emotional or sexual honesty. Unfortunately, this has allowed misguided devotees to argue that he led a quite unnatural existence.
Those who dislike Lewis and his work can be as unfair as the eccentric disciples who have worked so hard to canonise him. Some members of the British literati see him as old-fashioned and politically incorrect, a misogynist bully who tried to foist his retarded vision of religion onto people insidiously through his fiction, a man keen to hold back the natural evolution of the intellect.
Philip Hensher, a former Booker Prize judge, has called the Narnia books “poisonous, ghastly, priggish and half-witted”. He abhors what he describes as “Lewis’s creed of clean-living, muscular Christianity”.
Philip Pullman, who won the Whitbread Prize for His Dark Materials, has attacked Lewis’s books as “detestable”. He has argued that Lewis used fiction to glorify backward-thinking morals and beliefs, and that he was a misogynist racist with a “sneering attitude to anything remotely progressive in social terms or to people with brown faces”.
Pullman’s particular loathing centres on one of the final passages in The Chronicles of Narnia, where Susan Pevensie, one of the four children who first entered Narnia through the wardrobe, is excluded from the barn, which represents heaven or paradise.
The reason Lewis gives for her exclusion from paradise is that “she likes lipstick and nylons and invitations”. To Pullman this has suggested that Lewis considered a girl reaching sexual maturity to be such a terrible thing she should be banished to hell.
There can be no denying that there are many aspects of the Narnia books that are appalling. Lewis refers to “darkies”, and the bad guys (the Calormene) are clearly stereotypes based on Muslims. The social structure of Narnia is overtly modelled on the British imperial system, and the portals into this fantasy world are all located in Britain, which some believe offers as a subtext the concept that Britannia rules. Women are often attacked, as is modernity.
But, equally, one of the Calormene dies in battle while saving others and is offered entry into heaven. And while Susan is barred from paradise, her younger sister, Lucy, is the bravest and most honest character of the lot.
There is also the simple matter of taking into account the era in which Lewis lived and wrote. It is easy to brand as bigots, misogynists and racists those who lived in possibly less enlightened ages. But it might well be that in five decades from now some of today’s most successful children’s fiction will also be considered politically incorrect.
For most of his life Lewis, with great effort, resisted the tug of the past through denial and transference of his desires. Perhaps this is part of the reason he needed to find a substitute in religion. He was not St Jack; but nor was he the devil.
