Two journeys, made in the course of my researches for this biography, have brought home to me more vividly than any others the strange nature of my task.
The first was to Belfast in Northern Ireland. For those who are not Irish, their first glimpse of modern Belfast is a shock. Much of its ancient prosperity, derived from its magnificent shipyards, has gone. There is widespread unemployment and poverty. Walking the streets of the working-class districts of the city one is confronted by distressing images of human irrationality. Even the kerbstones shriek of their religious and political allegiance. Protestant, Unionist streets are painted red, white and blue in praise of the Queen and the Reformation. Catholic, Nationalist streets are daubed white, green and orange for Ireland and the Pope. In no place on earth does it seem truer that Christ came to bring not peace, but a sword. The post offices and police stations are barricaded like fortresses. There is no prospect here of the rational prevailing. Every week that passes, a bomb explodes or a gun is fired because of ancient, atavistic religious prejudice.
It would not be the best place in the world to take a non-believer in the hope of persuading him or her that Christianity was a very ennobling belief, but it is a very good place for a Christian to recognize what a small part reason plays in most human lives; and it might very well prompt the visitor, and even more the resident, to hope that some form of Christianity could be expounded which was the agreed and good thing which all Christians hold in common, the set of unchanging and saving beliefs which Lewis named Mere Christianity.
Driving out of the beleaguered city into the suburbs is immediately to encounter a different, happier world, a prosperous middle-class place which knows no violence; big, comfortable houses built to sustain and celebrate the simple happiness of family life. Down one such leafy road, you will find the house built by a Belfast police solicitor named Albert Lewis in 1905. It was in this lumpy Edwardian villa that C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren spent the most crucial period of their lives. Climbing up the small back staircase, I reached a landing on the second floor of the house, and there at the end of the corridor I found the ‘Little End Room’ where the boys had escaped from the grown-ups and indulged their childhood games.
For Lewis himself, it was not a house with happy memories, for it was here that the catastrophe of his life took place: the death of his mother on 23 August 1908, when Lewis was nine years old. The loss was something which he bottled up within himself, unable to appease it through the emotionally stultifying years of boarding-school education in England. In terms of his emotional life, the quest for his lost mother dominated his relations with women. His companion for over thirty years was a woman old enough to be his mother; and when she died it was not long before, like a Pavlovian dog trained to lacerate his heart with the same emotional experiences, he married a woman whose circumstances were exactly parallel to those of his own mother in 1908 – a woman dying of cancer who had two small sons.
Standing in the Little End Room, I realized that I was beginning to come to terms with the Lewis phenomenon, and why it had such a hugely popular appeal. I had thought to go there merely in order to soak up ‘atmosphere’. I realized that what Lewis was seeking with such painful earnestness all his life was not to be found in this house; nor had it ever been, for any of the time he had lived there after his mother’s death. Without the capacity to develop an ‘ordinary’ emotional life, based on a stable relationship with parents, Lewis was driven back and back into the Little End Room, ‘further up and further in’.
It would have been good to see the wardrobe in Belfast, but it was not there. To see that, I journeyed over three and a half thousand miles to a small liberal arts college in the suburbs of Chicago: Wheaton College, Illinois. Between the two journeys I had spent months reading Lewis, and hours talking to those who knew him. An image of what he was actually like, as a man, was by now vividly clear to me. The reasons why many of his Oxford colleagues had disliked him were obvious. He was argumentative and bullying. His jolly, red, honest face was that of an intellectual bruiser. He was loud, and he could be coarse. He liked what he called ‘man’s talk’, and he was frequently contemptuous in his remarks about the opposite sex. He was a heavy smoker – sixty cigarettes a day between pipes – and he liked to drink deep, roaring out his unfashionable views in Oxford bars. This – the ‘beer and Beowulf’ Lewis – was understandably uncongenial to those of a different temperament. But I had also learnt that he was a kind and patient teacher, a loyal friend, a magnificently astute and intelligent conversationalist who had read much and who had the capacity to fire his hearers with a longing to read his favourite authors for themselves. Few of his friends had ever heard Lewis allude to his inner life, and even his religion was more to be taken for granted than to be aired in conversation. The gatherings of cronies in pubs or college rooms had no feeling of an evangelical prayer group. Two members of that celebrated group, known as the Inklings, have told me that there was always an air of English embarrassment when the subject of religion cropped up, and that Lewis’s activities as a religious broadcaster and writer were not something with which his fellow-Christians in the Inklings felt at ease. These men knew almost nothing of the Lewis who had emerged in my reading of private letters and diaries. They knew nothing from him of his childhood trauma, little of his two great emotional attachments to women, and next to nothing of his spiritual journey, even though one of these men, Hugo Dyson, had been responsible in part for persuading Lewis to abandon atheism and become a Christian.
C. S. Lewis the popular Christian apologist, who was reaching so many readers in Europe and the United States, was a phenomenon who had a life of his own in the minds of the reading public. His friends did know that this activity had generated an enormous band of admirers and enquirers, who wrote to Lewis from every corner of the globe and could be sure of getting a written reply.
Lewis did not ask to become a cult figure, but by writing so faithfully to his correspondents, he allowed the cult to build up. For many, including the penfriend he eventually married, the author of The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity was a guru or spiritual master who might be expected to provide Answers to Life’s Problems. That is not the title of one of Lewis’s books. It is the title of a book by Dr Billy Graham, the most famous alumnus of Wheaton College, Illinois. As you approach the college, you see on your left an enormous Greek Revival building known as the Billy Graham Center, built in honour of the famous evangelist. It is hard to imagine Billy Graham enjoying C. S. Lewis’s company at any length, though I believe the two met during one of Dr Graham’s crusades in England. Lewis was impatient with puritanism and disliked non-smokers or teetotallers. He liked to talk of books, books, books, and he would not have shared any of Dr Graham’s political enthusiasms. But the wardrobe from Little Lea has come to repose at Wheaton College, Illinois.
The Marion E. Wade Center on the upper floor of the college library is devoted to the memorabilia of various Christian writers: George MacDonald, T. S. Eliot, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis and his brother Warren. The library has also recently acquired the papers of that veteran journalist and cynic Malcolm Muggeridge, and here the faithful may see Muggeridge’s portable typewriter kept, like the body of Lenin, in a glass case.
A portrait of C. S. Lewis, painted by T. M. Williams, smiles down on the reading room. It has the same glowing unreality as pious paintings of Thérèse of Lisieux or the Sacred Heart, adorning convent walls in days now gone. Hard by, in a glass display cabinet, are Lewis’s beer tankards and pipes, which in this abstemious atmosphere seem out of place. I worked at the table which, a brass plate informed me, had been in Lewis’s college rooms at Magdalen and subsequently in the dining-room at his house in Oxford, The Kilns. Dorothy L. Sayers and T. S. Eliot and many other famous people, it was claimed, had used this table. I had been reading Lewis, and talking to those who had known him, for the better part of twenty years, and doing serious research into his life for two years. I have come across no possible occasion when T. S. Eliot, with whom Lewis