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C. S. LEWIS
Born: Belfast, Ireland (now in Northern Ireland); November 29, 1898
Died: Oxford, England; November 22, 1963
Also known as: Clive Staples Lewis; N. W. Clerk; Clive Hamilton; Jack Lewis
Principal long fiction
Out of the Silent Planet, 1938 (with Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, known as the Space Trilogy)
The Screwtape Letters, 1942
Perelandra, 1943
That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy Tale for Grownups, 1945
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, 1950
Prince Caspian, 1951
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, 1952
The Silver Chair, 1953
The Horse and His Boy, 1954
The Magician’s Nephew, 1955
The Last Battle, 1956
The Chronicles of Narnia, 1950-1956 (collective title for previous 7 novels)
Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold, 1956
Other literary forms
Although his novels for adults and children continue to be widely read and admired, C.
S. Lewis is also well known as a religious essayist and literary scholar-critic. His religious writings of three decades include autobiography ( The Pilgrim’s Regress, 1933; Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, 1955; A Grief Observed, 1961) and essays in varying lengths and forms. Some of his essays include The Personal Heresy (1939; with E. M. W.
Tillyard), Rehabilitations (1939), The Problem of Pain (1940), The Abolition of Man (1943), Miracles: A Preliminary Study (1947), Mere Christianity (1952), Reflections on the Psalms (1958), and The Four Loves (1960). His works of a religious nature that were published after Lewis’s death include Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (1964), Letters to an American Lady (1967), God in the Dock (1970), and The Joyful Christian: 127
Readings from C. S. Lewis (1977).
Lewis’s criticism, focused primarily on medieval and Renaissance studies, includes
The Allegory of Love (1936), A Preface to “Paradise Lost” (1942), English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (1954), Studies in Words (1960), An Experiment in Criticism (1961), and The Discarded Image (1964). Several volumes of criticism appeared posthumously, including Spenser’s Images of Life (1967), Selected Literary Essays (1969), and Present Concerns (1986).
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Less widely known are Lewis’s early volumes of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919), a collection of lyrics; and Dymer (1926), a narrative. The posthumous The Dark Tower, and Other Stories (1977) includes an unpublished fragment of a novel. This collection and one other, Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966), contain the only extant fictional pieces not printed during Lewis’s lifetime. The Wade Collection at Wheaton College (Illinois)
and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, hold many volumes of Lewis papers, including eleven
volumes of Lewis family letters written from 1850 to 1930.
Achievements
C. S. Lewis’s achievements as a novelist are hard to separate from his role as a Chris-
tian apologist and from his impeccable literary scholarship. Many of Lewis’s readers be-
lieve that his greatness lies in the unusually wide scope of his work: He wrote so much so well in so many forms. His Mere Christianity, for example, is a superb primer on Christian ideas, and The Four Loves and A Grief Observed are powerful explorations of the endurance of love despite doubt and deep pain. The Screwtape Letters, Lewis’s most popular book in the United States, continues to enthrall new readers with its witty yet serious study of the war between good and evil in the modern world. Among his critical writings, The Allegory of Love remains a classic study of medieval literature and society, while The Discarded Image is one of the very best discussions of the contrast between the medieval worldview and the modern mind.
The popularity of Lewis’s novels for adults ( Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength—known as the Space Trilogy—and Till We Have Faces) owes more perhaps to their treatment of themes also developed in his nonfiction than to their literary excellence, although the Space Trilogy is widely read among devotees of fantasy
and science fiction who have little acquaintance with Lewis’s other works. The extraordinary appeal of Lewis’s fiction for children, the Narnia books, is undisputed. Each year, these seven novels gain thousands of new readers of all ages and are, for many, the introduction to Lewis that inspires them to delve into his other works. Indeed, had Lewis never published another word, the Narnia books would have ensured his reputation with both
critics and the public.
Biography
Born in Belfast in 1898, the son of Albert Lewis, a successful lawyer, and Flora Hamil-
ton Lewis, a writer and mathematician, Clive Staples Lewis spent his early childhood in an atmosphere of learning and imagination. His mother tutored him in French and Latin before he was seven; his nurse, Lizzie Endicott, taught him the folktales of Ireland. Clive and his brother, Warren, devoted long, often rainy afternoons to exploring the book-lined corridors of Little Lea, their home. As small children, the brothers invented their own country, Boxen, for which they wrote a four-hundred-year chronicle and which they peopled
with animal characters who became subjects of individual stories. These early-childhood
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adventures were of incalculable influence on Lewis’s long fiction, written almost half a century later.
With his mother’s death from cancer in 1908, Lewis’s life changed drastically and irre-
vocably. A disconsolate, bewildered Albert Lewis sent his sons to boarding school in England, the first of several cruel experiences before age sixteen that nurtured in Lewis a hatred for public school education. At last persuading his father to place him with the
demanding but kind tutor W. T. Kirkpatrick in 1914, Lewis developed his great scholarly
talents and won a scholarship to University College, Oxford, two years later. Before taking his entrance exams, however, Lewis was recruited into the army and served as a sec-
ond lieutenant on the front lines in France during World War I.
Surviving a wound and the mental shocks of war, Lewis happily entered Oxford life in
1919, his education financed by his father—whose support in other ways would always be
lacking. Perhaps to compensate for this lack of parental affection, Lewis developed a
steadfast friendship with a Mrs. Moore, the mother of a friend who had died fighting in
France. With Mrs. Moore and her young daughter, Maureen, Lewis set up housekeeping,
this arrangement continuing thirty years, until Mrs. Moore’s death in 1951. Lewis’s tenure at Oxford, as student, tutor, and fellow of Magdalen College, lasted even longer, ending in 1954 with his acceptance of the chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Magda-lene College, Cambridge. During the Oxford years, he wrote and published most of his
fifty-eight books of adult and children’s fiction, literary criticism, essays, Christian apologetics, and poetry. It was there also that Lewis, influenced by such close friends as J.
R. R. Tolkien, underwent his conversion to Christianity.
Lewis’s Christian fervor led to widely read publications and to a long series of radio
talks before and during World War II. His faith also inspired fictional works, including his Space Trilogy, written during the war, and his Narnia books for children. Many of his Oxford colleagues, however, were offended by his overt religiousness—and his popularity.
Through these years, they thus denied Lewis the Magdalen professorship that his emi-
nence as a literary scholar warranted.
With his rise to a more esteemed position in the more congenial atmosphere of Cam-
bridge, Lewis completed, among other
projects, the books of Narnia, the first of which
had been published in 1950, and wrote perhaps his finest novel, Till We Have Faces. This last work of fiction was dedicated to Joy Davidman Gresham, an American admirer with
whom he had corresponded for several years and who came to England to join him in
1955. They were married in 1956, and, according to Lewis, “feasted on love” for the four years they shared before Joy’s death from bone cancer in 1960. Despite his own worsen-ing health, Lewis continued to produce autobiographical and critical works until suffering a heart attack in 1963. He died on November 22, the date of President John F. Kennedy’s
assassination and of the death of writer Aldous Huxley.
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Analysis
The happy fact of C. S. Lewis’s creation of long fictional works is that the more of them he wrote, the better he became as a novelist. This is not to say that with each book from Out of the Silent Planet to Till We Have Faces he measurably improved, but from the early Space Trilogy (1938-1945) through the Narnia tales (1950-1956) to his last novel, there is a clear change in Lewis’s conception of fiction. In the early books, characters exemplify definite sides in an ethical debate, and plot is the working out of victory for Lewis’s side.
In the later books, however, character becomes the battleground of ambiguous values, and plot takes place more and more within the minds of the characters.
The Space Trilogy
The hero of the Space Trilogy, Cambridge don Elwin Ransom, is often less the protag-
onist of novels than an embodiment of the Christian and intellectual virtues that Lewis recommended in his essays. Throughout the trilogy, Ransom represents Lewis’s ideal of the
relentless intellectual, his learning solidly founded on respect for great ideas from earlier ages, who valiantly maintains his integrity despite the powerful temptations posed by
modern materialism. In both Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra—Ransom’s journeys to Mars (Malacandra) and Venus (Perelandra), respectively—Ransom’s adversary is
as clearly villainous as Ransom himself is heroic. The antagonist is Edward Weston, a
brilliant physicist, who represents for Lewis that most insidious modern outgrowth of Renaissance humanism: the belief that the highest goal of humankind is to establish domi-
nance over all forms of life in as many worlds as humans can conquer. This view, which
Lewis saw as the root of the boundless ambition of political leaders Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini, is exemplified in Weston’s misuse of technology to build a spacecraft that enables him to reach other planets so that he might make them colonies of Earth.
By moving the scene of this attempt away from Earth, Lewis can manipulate material
reality so that the limitations of Weston’s philosophy become obvious and his actions ludi-crous. Assuming the innate superiority of man over all other forms, and thus a perpetual state of war between man and nature, Weston fails to see the simplest, most significant
facts of the new worlds he intends to conquer. As Ransom, the Christian student of myths and languages, easily perceives, the forces that rule Mars and Venus are both fully hospitable to humankind and infinitely more powerful. Thus, Weston shoots gentle creatures be-
cause they appear strange and, in a parody of the European explorers, tries to bribe with shiny trinkets the Oyarsa of Malacandra, who, as Ransom learns, is second only in power
and wisdom to Maleldil, ruler of the universe. In contrast to Weston, Ransom—a far truer scientist than his opponent—befriends and learns the language of these extraterrestrials; hence, mysteries are opened to him. In Out of the Silent Planet, he learns that only Earth (Thulcandra), long under the dominance of the “bent eldil,” is deprived of clear knowledge of the Oyarsa and Maleldil; Thulcandrans believe themselves enlightened above all
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others, when in reality they are the most benighted. He learns also that the universe is in a state of becoming: that the creatures of old worlds, such as Malacandra, can no longer be endangered by such forces as those that guide Weston, but that newer worlds, such as
Thulcandra, are still theaters of contending principles, while the youngest worlds, such as Perelandra, have yet to achieve spiritual identity.
This is vital knowledge for Ransom, who realizes, in the second book, that he has been
given wisdom because he has also been given the responsibility of helping to bring about Maleldil’s reign on Perelandra, which places him in open confrontation with Weston, now
clearly the mere instrument of the bent eldil. In a probing recapitulation of the temptation of Eve, Lewis has Ransom and Weston contend, somewhat in the mode of the medieval
psychomachia, for the mind of Tinidril, the first woman of Perelandra. As the confound-ingly subtle arguments of the Unman (the spirit that controls Weston) begin to conquer
Tinidril, Ransom at last understands that he must physically fight, to the death, his adversary. Despite his slim chance of survival, Ransom attacks the Unman; he ultimately de-
feats him, though suffering wounds, incredible fatigue, and near despair. It is an epic battle, reminiscent of the Pearl-Poet’s fourteenth century manuscript Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596); Ransom’s faith and courage in the fight prepare the reader for his apotheosis in the final chapters, wherein Lewis’s paradisiacally lush description of Perelandra takes on an almost beatific vividness and illumination.
In novelistic terms, Perelandra surpasses Out of the Silent Planet in its attention to the development of Ransom’s awareness of his role and his struggle to maintain his integrity in the face of fears and misleading appearances. Nevertheless, its extraterrestrial setting and its clearly demarcated hero and villain make Perelandra more an epic romance than a novel. This is not to prefer one book to the other, but it is to distinguish them both from the third part of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, which may be Lewis’s most interesting fiction, although not his most consistent. That Hideous Strength tries to harmonize hetero-geneous elements of romance, epic, and novel. Following the novelist’s impulse, Lewis
brings his setting back to Earth and localizes it in the sort of place he knew best, a venerable English college town, which he calls Edgestow. He also centers the reader’s interest on two authentic protagonists, Jane and Mark Studdock, whose story is their painful, humiliating, sometimes dangerous progress toward faith and self-awareness. They act bravely in the ultimate crisis, both risking torture and death, but they engage in nothing like the epic struggle of Ransom and the Unman.
Still, the events in which they engage are of epic magnitude, and in this thrust of the
book Lewis returns to familiar fictional territory. The plot concerns a powerful conspiracy to turn Britain into a totalitarian state. This conspiracy is opposed most strenuously by a small underground directed by Elwin Ransom, now a heroic, almost godlike leader,
whose powers are spiritual rather than physical. His main adversaries are men who, like
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ousness, and cruelty. Having established a research institute called the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments (N.I.C.E.), these men use the press, political infiltrators, and their own “police” to avoid, placate, or squash opposition to their Nazi-like program of
“social planning.” Mark Studdock is one of the bright but indecisive minds easily co-opted by the N.I.C.E. Lewis shows convincingly how the leaders play on his ego and his fears of rejection in order to exploit his talent as a journalist. Conversely, Jane Studdock falls in with the resistance group; she weighs its values against those of her husband and grad
ually comes to see that whichever road she chooses will mean great danger for both of them.
She chooses the resistance.
Had Lewis limited the book to the clash between political philosophies and its impact
on two ordinary people, he would have had a conventional novel, but he wanted to portray this clash as occurring on a cosmic level, as a war between pure good and pure evil. Since the combatants in this novel are the human representatives of these supernatural forces, the reader necessarily finds himself once more in the realm of romance. Aware of his mixing of genres in That Hideous Strength, Lewis called the amalgam a fairy tale, arguing that his work fell into that long tradition in which supernatural events subsume the ordinary activities of realistic characters. What fairy tale means here is that when the N.I.C.E. performs such blatant works as the turning of rivers from their courses, the trapping of huge numbers of animals for vivisection, and the deforestation of ancient preserves, they call down on themselves the wrath of nature, personified in a resurrected Merlin, who pledges allegiance to Ransom as the spiritual successor of Arthur. His obedience allows Ransom
to reinvest him with eldilic power, which enables him single-handedly to destroy the
N.I.C.E. Add to the appearance of Merlin such important romantic elements as Jane
Studdock’s clairvoyance and the veneration of a talking head by the N.I.C.E., and That Hideous Strength seems almost more romance than novel.
The book should be judged as a fairy tale. Lewis warns the reader in his preface not to
be deceived by the “hum-drum scenes and persons” into thinking this a realistic fiction.
He merely intends the familiar names and places to heighten the reader’s appreciation of the importance of the spiritual battles occurring around and within each individual. Indeed, one explicit purpose of the book is to warn England—here Lewis was prophetic—
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