God's Storyteller
The curious life and prodigious influence of C. S. Lewis, the man behind The Chronicles of Narnia
Complicating the story of this remarkable career is Lewis's highly unusual domestic life. As a 20-year-old demobilized war veteran, returned to Oxford's University College to finish his degree, Jack Lewis began living with a woman 25 years his senior, the mother--married but separated--of a deceased war chum, Paddy Moore. Starting at least partly as a sexual liaison, Lewis's 30-year menage with the witty, domineering, and thoroughly antireligious Janie King Moore (called "Minto") evolved into something more closely resembling a curious mother-son relationship. In this case, as Lewis's friends all saw, the striking oddity was Minto's manner of treating Jack like a slightly addled household servant, subjecting him to a barrage of menial tasks that made his prodigious achievements--from an Oxford triple first degree in philosophy, classics, and English to some 50 books of criticism, apologetics, and fiction to tireless lecturing and broadcasting--seem all the more remarkable.
Connections. Now, though, with the film version of his favorite work opening at the multiplexes, perhaps the most pertinent question about Lewis is why and how a man of such complex parts came to write one of the great classics of children's literature. That question has prompted a number of new book-length popular and scholarly treatments, including Colin Duriez's The C. S. Lewis Chronicles, David Downing's Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles , and Alan Jacobs's The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis . The best of these works go a long way toward explaining the improbable but compelling connections among his life, his literary and theological influences, and his art.
It wasn't just Lewis's self-acknowledged lack of rapport with children that made him an unlikely author of the Narnia tales. Jacobs, a professor of English at Wheaton College in Illinois, points out that Lewis was "never an aficionado of children's books." He was, however, a strikingly independent judge of literature who, against the critical standards of his time, thought that the ethical shape of a work transcended its merely formal qualities in determining whether it was worthy or not. The few works of children's literature that Lewis read and cherished all conveyed a strong ethical vision.
That was why, for instance, he found nothing odd in talking about Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit in his magisterial study of John Milton, A Preface to "Paradise Lost. " In his view, Milton and Potter both offered serious treatments of the consequences of disobedience. As Jacobs observes, "Few writers other than Lewis could open to us that sphere of experience in which John Milton and Beatrix Potter can be seen as laborers in the same vineyard--that sphere in which a moral unity suddenly seems far more important than those otherwise dramatic differences in time, genre, and purpose." Lewis's own openness to that higher sphere of experience was what prompted him to give his friend and fellow Oxford don J. R. R. Tolkien such decisive words of encouragement to continue work on what became The Hobbit (encouragement Tolkien never reciprocated when he read early snippets of Narnia , which he judged an unruly literary grab bag). It also illuminates one of Lewis's motives for writing the Narnia stories, perhaps even the most crucial one: a deeply moral desire to steer children away from the same mistakes that the younger C. S. Lewis had made.
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