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C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963) | |
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British literary critic, scholar and author, known for his classic fantasy stories for children, THE CHRONICLES OF NARNIA (1950-1956), which show the influence of J.R.R. Tolkien. During his literary career, Lewis was one of the most popular spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world. "'When Aslan said you could never go back to Narnia, he meant the Narnia you were thinking of. But that was not the real Narnia. That had a beginning and an end. It was only a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia which has always been there and always will be there: just as our own world, England and all, is only a shadow or copy of something in Aslan's real world. You need not mourn over Narnia, Lucy. All of the old Narnia that mattered, all the dear creatures, have been drawn into the real Narnia through the Door. And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream.'" (from The Last Battle, 1956) Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, as the son of A.J. Lewis, a solicitor, and Flora Augusta (Hamilton). His mother, a promising mathematician, died when he was nine years old. Lewis had been very close to his mother, who taught him to love books and encouraged him to study French and Latin. Lewis and his brother were brought up by their father. During his childhood, Lewis created the imaginary country of Bloxen. In the attic of their house he had a "study" where learned and first practiced the craft of writing. Many of these tales were later published in BOXEN: THE IMAGINARY WORLD OF THE YOUNG C.S. LEWIS (1985). After attending schools in Hertfordshire, Northern Ireland and Malvern, Lewis was educated privatedly in Great Bookham, Surrey. "I am the product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also of endless books," Lewis wrote in his autobiographical book Surprised by Joy (1955). "There were books in the study, books in the drawing-room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled as high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents' interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most empathically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves..." Lewis's early favorites were Edith Nesbit's books, among them The Story of the Amulet (1906), which mixed fantasy with reality, and the uncut edition of Gulliver's Travels. Later he read the Norse myths and sagas, and such historical books as Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis and Lew Wallace's Ben Hur. Later he also found The Odyssey, Voltaire, Milton and Spenser. Lewis's private tutor, W.T. Kirkpatrick, taught him to read Greek for pleasure. From 1917 to 1919 Lewis served in the Somerset Light Infantry. While in Keble Kollege, where Lewis had joined a cadet battalion, Lewis met Mrs Janie King Moore, a much older woman - she was 45 at that time. Mrs Moore was the mother of Edward Francis Courtenay ("Paddy") Moore, with whom Lewis shared rooms. She had separated from her husband. During the Battle of Arras, Lewis was accidentally wounded in the back. While convalescing, he met again Mrs Moore, who followed him to Oxford with her daughter Maureen. However, Lewis concealed this from his father. Lewis lived with Mrs Moore until her death in January 1951, at the age of seventynine. Lewis graduated from University College, Oxford, in 1923. He was fellow and tutor in English at Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years (1925-54). From 1954 to 1963 he was professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His lectures were crowded - he had a phenomenal memory, and he could speak spontaneously about Greek and Latin texts without notes. With J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams, Lewis formed a literary group called 'The Inklings', which took shape in the 1930s. Their Tuesday lunchtime sessions at the Bird and Baby pub became a well known part of Oxford social life. Williams died in 1945 and the meetings faded away in 1949. Among other members of the club were Christopher Tolkien and Owen Barfield. Lewis preferred the company of men. He considered that women's minds were intrinsically inferior to men's. A visitor at the Socratic Society of Oxford portrayed Lewis as "ruddy of complexion, radiating health, of substantial girth all over, and his eyes sparkled with mirth." As Surprised by Joy demonstrates, the watershed in Lewis's life was his conversion from atheism to Christianity. He had began to lose his faith at the age of 13, partly due to his deep-rooted pessimism, and partly due to pantheistic experiences and interest in Wagner's music. After reading such writers as Chesterfield, Bergson, George MacDonald, and George Herbert, and abandoning his youthful snobbery, he became a deist in 1929, and later he was associated with such neo-Christians as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, Dorothy L. Sayers, and J.R.R. Tolkien, who was a Catholic; some other teachers at Oxford also influenced him. In the 1930s Lewis started to publish popular religious books, among them A PILGRIM'S REGRESS (1933), a thinly disguised allegory of his own conversion, which he wrote in Ireland in two weeks. Lewis's conversion and his reputation as a prominent Christian writer and radio personality strained his relationship with Mrs Moore, who declared herself an atheist later in life. THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS (1942) was a correspondence from a senior devil to his nephew concerning the latter's task of winning a young man to damnation. THE PROBLEM OF PAIN (1940) asked, "If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?" Lewis suggested that much of the suffering in God's world can be traced to the evil choices people make. In his own life, Lewis followed Christian principles. He gave away two-thirds of his income, sat at the bedside of the sick, and personally served the poor. Lewis's literary criticism opposed classical, traditional, and purely literary values in favour of the biographical, psychological, and impressionistic. However, it took a long period before he began to appreciate modern poetry. Lewis was the chief spokesman for the view that a good reader receives the text, it affects one's senses, but the bad reader "uses" it - the text relieves one's life but does not add to it. Among Lewis's most substantial books is ENGLISH LITERATURE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY (1954). As an essayist Lewis did not avoid controversial issues. In 'The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment' he questioned the idea that to seek to "cure" a criminal is nobler than to rely on punishment. Islam he described as "a Christian heresy." In OUT OF SILENT PLANET (1938) Lewis put his Christian beliefs in the setting of a science fiction story. The book started Lewis's Ransom trilogy, where the achievements of science are in alliance with those of demonic evil. In the first part Ransom is kidnapped by an amoral Wellsian scientist, Weston, and taken to Mars. The series continued in PERELANDRA (1943), in which an angel carries Ransom to Venus. In THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH (1945) Ransom is back on Earth, and calls Merlin to fight against an unpleasant scientific organization, the N.I.C.E., the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments. The Chronicles of Narnia has turned out to be the most lasting of Lewis's novels. "I wrote the books I should have liked to read," Lewis said. "That's always been my reason for writing." The Chronicles tell the story of a group of children, who come into contact with the mysterious other world of Narnia, where the lion Aslan is the prototype of Christ. "I don't know where the Lion came from or why He came," Lewis explained later. "But once He was there He pulled the whole story together." The portal to Narnia, a kind of medieval vision of Paradise, is a wardrobe through which the four sibling children, Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy enter a secondary world. In the first story the bad Witch is destroyed in a battle. In the sequels the children travel in Narnia and meet sea monsters, dragons, mermaids, wizards and other creatures. Turbaned, dark-skinned people called Calormenes, who worship a demon named Tash, also cause trouble - Lewis's view of Muslims couldn't be more explicit. The final books deal with Narnia's beginning and end. In the last Armageddon story, with its death-and-resurrection theme, the struggle is between young King Tirian and the forces of evil, as represented by Shift the Ape and Puzzle the donkey. The harmony of Narnia is destroyed and Father Time puts out the sun. Jill and Eustache appear from a railway train to help young Tirian, "last of the Kings of Narnia." Aslan reveals the truth: the children were killed in a railway accident. "Your father and mother and all of you are - as you used to call it in the Shadowlands - dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended; this is the morning." Lewis ends the book telling that they lived happily ever after - it was for them only the beginning of the real story. Lewis was briefly married to Helen Joy Davidman, a Jewish American poet, who had two children. They met in 1952, but their correspondence had started before it. Lewis's years at Cambridge were happy - Joy Davidman was always good-humoured and shared his delight in argument for argument's sake. She died of cancer in 1960. Lewis keep the marriage secret from Tolkien, which caused tension in their friendship. Lewis's notes from this period was published under the title A GRIEF OBSERVED (1961) The relationship was the subject of the film Shadowlands (1994), directed by William Nicholson and starring Debra Winger and Anthony Hopkins. Shadowlands was based on Nicholson's television script from 1985 and a successful stage play. Lewis died of osteoporosis on November 22, 1963. In 1988 Kathryn Lindskoog published a study (The C.S. Lewis Hoax) in which she questioned the authenticity of a number of Lewis's works published from 1966 to 1991, among them The Dark Tower (1977). Lindskoog continued the debate in Light in the Shadowlands (2001), claiming that the author's posthumous books are at least partly spurious. For further reading: C.S. Lewis: A Biography, by Roger Lancelyn Green and Walter Hooper (1974); The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter (1978); Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman, by Brian Sibley (1985); C.S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion by J. Beverluis (1985); Clive Staples Lewis by W. Griffin (1986); The C.S. Lewis Hoax by Kathryn Lindskoog (1988); C.S. Lewis: A Biography, by A.N. Wilson (1990); The Fiction of C.S. Lewis by K. Filmer (1993); The Chronicle of Narnia by C.N. Manlove (1993); The Man Who Created Narnia by M. Coren (1996); C.S. Lewis: Christian and Storyteller by B. Gromley (1998); Sleuthing C.S. Lewis: More Light in the Shadowlands by Kathryn Lindskoog (2001) - See other fantasy worlds: Tove Jansson (The Moomintrolls), J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-Earth Selected bibliography:
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