The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 - 1963 - Hardcover

Lewis, C. S.

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9780060819224: The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 - 1963

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060819227 ISBN 13: 9780060819224

Publisher: HarperOne, 2007

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This collection, carefully chosen and arranged by Walter Hooper, is the most extensive ever published. Included here are the letters Lewis wrote to such luminaries as J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, Arthur C. Clarke, Sheldon Vanauken, and Dom Bede Griffiths. To some particular friends, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Lewis wrote fifty letters alone. The letters deal with all of Lewis's interests—theology, literary criticism, poetry, fantasy, children's stories—as well as his relationships with family members and friends.

The third and final volume begins with Lewis, already a household name from his BBC radio broadcasts and popular spiritual books, on the cusp of publishing his most famous and enduring book, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which would ensure his immortality in the literary world. It covers his relationship with and marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham, subject of the film Shadowlands, and includes letters right up to his death on November 22, 1963, the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

This volume also includes both a special section of newly found letters from earlier time periods covered in volumes one and two and mini-biographies of Lewis's regular correspondents.

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About the Author:

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably one of the most influential writers of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than thirty books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every year. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include Out of the Silent Planet, The Great Divorce, The Screwtape Letters, and the universally acknowledged classics The Chronicles of Narnia. To date, the Narnia books have sold over 100 million copies and have been transformed into three major motion pictures.

Clive Staples Lewis (1898-1963) fue uno de los intelectuales m�s importantes del siglo veinte y podr�a decirse que fue el escritor cristiano m�s influyente de su tiempo. Fue profesor particular de literatura inglesa y miembro de la junta de gobierno en la Universidad Oxford hasta 1954, cuando fue nombrado profesor de literatura medieval y renacentista en la Universidad Cambridge, cargo que desempe�� hasta que se jubil�. Sus contribuciones a la cr�tica literaria, literatura infantil, literatura fant�stica y teolog�a popular le trajeron fama y aclamaci�n a nivel internacional. C. S. Lewis escribi� m�s de treinta libros, lo cual le permiti� alcanzar una enorme audiencia, y sus obras a�n atraen a miles de nuevos lectores cada a�o. Sus m�s distinguidas y populares obras incluyen Las Cr�nicas de Narnia, Los Cuatro Amores, Cartas del Diablo a Su Sobrino y Mero Cristianismo.

From The Washington Post:

Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven In January 1949, when C.S. Lewis was only 50, he thought his life was over. "I feel my zeal for writing, and whatever talent I originally possessed, to be decreasing; nor (I believe) do I please my readers as I used to." The unassuming Oxford don once said he'd be remembered as "one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown."

Then he began having nightmares about lions.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which was written quickly and published in 1950, became an enduring success. "I don't know where the Lion came from or why he came," Lewis wrote later. "But once He was there He pulled the whole story together, and soon He pulled the six other Narnian stories in after him."

Some of the era's most magical children's literature and science fiction came from the pen of this unprepossessing professor of medieval and Renaissance literature; modern Christianity's most approachable and eloquent apologias were articulated by this former atheist. Yet despite international fame, to all external appearances, he led an uneventful, bookish life.

This last volume of his Collected Letters covers not only the Narnia novels but his brief marriage to the divorced American writer Joy Davidman; his major work of criticism, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century; and the overdue professional recognition he won when he was granted an endowed chair at Cambridge after years of snubs at Oxford, where he remained a lowly, overworked tutor.

Editor and friend Walter Hooper calls him "one of the last great letter-writers" -- the last of a generation who did not lift a telephone receiver when he had something to say or tap out e-mails on a computer keyboard. Some of the recipients richly merited his ink: the detective novelist, theologian and Dante translator Dorothy L. Sayers; St. Giovanni Calabria of Verona (correspondence in Latin); T.S. Eliot; the sci-fi maestro Arthur C. Clarke; and the American writer Robert Penn Warren. In these letters, Lewis swaps quips in Latin and Greek and quotes Spenser, Statius, Beowulf, Horace, Wordsworth, Terence and Augustus. Other letters were from cranks, whiners and down-and-out charity cases; he answered them all.

"The pen has become to me what the oar is to a galley slave," he wrote of the disciplined torture of writing letters for hours every day. He complained about the deterioration of his handwriting, the rheumatism in his right hand and the winter cold numbing his fingers. In the era of the ballpoint, he used a nib pen dipped in ink every four or five words.

The letters undermine the myth of a scholarly bachelor idyll. The enemies of peace were in his own household -- especially Janie Moore, the mother of a fellow soldier killed in World War I, sometimes referred to as his "mother" and by Warren as a "horrid old woman." "Strictly between ourselves," Lewis wrote to a friend, "I have lived most of it (that is now over) in a house wh. was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amidst senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares," he wrote. "I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over (tho' a different trouble has taken its place) do I begin to realize quite how bad it was." His brother Warren's chronic drunkenness was the "different trouble." Oxford was no refuge; when Lewis assumed the Cambridge post, it ended "nearly thirty years of the tutorial grind," exhausting donkey-work that regularly burned 14 hours a day.

He summarized the net result: "I am a hard, cold, black man inside and in my life have not wept enough." That problem, at least, was soon to be solved -- taking us to the biggest riddle of his life. Lewis's romance, immortalized in the movie "Shadowlands," is touted as one of the great love stories of the century. But as we read it in real time, Lewis more resembles a schoolboy who doesn't want to be seen walking home with a girl.

It's not at all clear why. Joy Davidman had been a Yale Younger Poet, cherry-picked by Auden, and held a master's degree from Columbia. Even Lewis's biographer and chum George Sayer, otherwise hostile to Davidman, describes her as an attractive, "amusingly abrasive New Yorker." Yet Lewis, in letters, had clumsily referred to her as "queer," "ex-communist, Jewess-by-race, convertite."

Under her influence, Lewis wrote his finest novel, Till We Have Faces. Yet he worried that the quotation on the title page -- Shakespeare's "Love is too young to know what conscience is" -- might be too close to the dedication. "Otherwise, though the lady would not, the public might, think they had some highly embarrassing relation to each other." Embarrassing? Like their wedding a week before, on April 23, 1956?

Davidman was diagnosed with cancer that summer, and Lewis finally 'fessed up with a wedding announcement the following Christmas. "You will not think anything wrong is going to happen," Lewis wrote to Dorothy Sayers. "Certain problems do not arise between a dying woman and an elderly man." Problems? Like sex? At times, he seemed to pass the marriage off as an act of charity.

In a sense it was -- but not in the way others guessed. Although many have impugned the motives of Davidman, the reason is revealed in a footnote: Lewis confided to his friend Sheldon Vanauken that he had married "to prevent the Government deporting her to America as a communist." She had been a prominent party member, and the congressional red scare was in full swing when she fled the United States.

Yet within a few months, Lewis was writing to Sayers, "My heart is breaking and I was never so happy before: at any rate there is more in life than I knew about." And elsewhere: "We are crazily in love."

A miraculous three-year remission ensued, providing the most blissful episode of Lewis's later life. Davidman died in 1960. Lewis followed on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President Kennedy was shot.

A humdrum life? Hardly. But most will read these letters for more than Lewis's life story. Through the triumphs and anguish, the frustrations and bereavement, Lewis's letters unspool his spiritual autobiography.

It's time to reclaim Lewis from the religious right, which has made of him an unlikely champion. The same audience would, perhaps, find it hard to square its adulation with his genuine curiosity about Hinduism, his love of The Iliad, his endorsement of Zoroastrianism as "one of the finest of the Pagan religions," and his eagerness to see more recognition for the Persian epic The Shahnameh. They might be more surprised that he supported his elder stepson's eventual entrance into a yeshiva. Lewis's religion was nuanced. He didn't believe in word-for-word inerrancy of the Bible, saying that too few "know by the smell . . . the difference in myth, in legend, and a bit of primitive reportage."

In any case, Lewis's wry, erudite, often spiritually profound letters are too good to be co-opted. He could be a bit of a prig, but his inner life is no dusty relic, irrelevant to our world today. In fact, in an era of New Age fuzziness, his mental clarity refreshes.

Reviewed by Cynthia L. Haven
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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