Every C. S. Lewis book published by HarperCollins carries an endorsement by John Updike, the late novelist. It says, “I read Lewis for comfort and pleasure many years ago, and a glance into the books revives my old admiration.” It makes me laugh, because Lewis would have hated that quote. Of course, if he’d met Mr. Updike, he would have been perfectly civil. He would have said, “Thank you for the nice blurb” (if you can imagine C. S. Lewis using the word blurb) and offered to sign his copy. But, inside, he would have seethed a little.
As Lewis himself said, “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” If his books made us comfortable, he would consider it a bad job.
Having been converted by Lewis from a very comfortable, “liberal” version of Christianity to a more arduous orthodoxy, though, I can say that Updike is right. Of course he is. There are very few pleasures so wholesome—or so pleasing—as sitting in a familiar chair with a cup of tea and a copy of Mere Christianity or The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Both works are challenging. But Lewis wasn’t like so many modern writers, who “challenge us” just because they like to watch us squirm. He kindly, patiently urges us towards something—something better than what we had before. Lewis has the “Christ-like union of tenderness and severity” he found in George MacDonald. That union is impossible to fake. It’s found only in those men who speak and write for the sake, not of power or fame, but of love.
Hence, too, his signature wit and warmth. Opening one of Lewis’s books, you don’t hear him thundering from the rostrum. We always seem to find him in his own rooms. That’s because he’s our friend. We’re like the disciples of John the Baptist who ask, “Where are you staying?” Lewis says, “Come and see.” (Jesus wasn’t only recruiting followers: He was making friends.) Reading C. S. Lewis, you can practically feel the fire burning in the hearth of his study at Oxford. You can smell the old ale-soaked wood at the Eagle and Child. It makes you want to put on a tweed jacket, light your pipe, and go for a long walk to a little country church.
It is incredible to think that this man, Clive Staples Lewis—“Jack” to his friends, like you and me—was a combat veteran. Lewis served valiantly in the First World War, enlisting at the age of eighteen. At nineteen, he was promoted to Second Lieutenant. At twenty, during a major battle near the French town of Riez-du-Vinage, an artillery shell exploded near his position. Lewis was badly injured; shrapnel riddled his body and punctured his lung. “Just after I was hit, I found (or thought I found) that I was not breathing and concluded that this was death,” he later recalled. “I felt no fear and certainly no courage. It did not seem to be an occasion for either.”
So, too, with another “cozy” writer: J. R. R. Tolkien. The author of The Hobbit was twenty-four when he fought in the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest of World War I. He wasn’t injured, but he did come down with a horrible disease then known as trench fever. He was deemed unfit for further service and medically discharged from the army. That’s when he began to write.
What’s curious is that Tolkien went out of his way not to draw inspiration from his experiences in the War. (Whether he succeeded is another matter.) As he wrote in the introduction to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, “The real war does not resemble the legendary war in its processes or its conclusions.” Tolkien confessed, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned.”
His own history he summed up rather grimly: “The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten, in days when motor-cars were rare objects (I had never seen one) and men were still building suburban railways.” Also, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”
This is the man who famously said, “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” He spoke from experience.
All of this came as a surprise to me, though maybe it shouldn’t.
Friends, you can read the rest of this essay at Hearth & Field. I’m sorry there’s no “original content” today. I’ve gone through three computers this year, and now this one’s on the fritz. Instead of the Luddites smashing technology, technology is now smashing the Luddites.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the rest of the essay. See you next Friday. Until then, have a blessed Holy Week.
Peace and the Good!