In a couple of weeks, the world will be captivated by the blockbuster film release, “Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe” – and will be logically curious about who wrote it, what inspired him, and what he was really like.
Remembering C. S. Lewis: Recollections of Those Who Knew Him (see: http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/vs_jamescomo_dec05.asp ), just released by Ignatius Press, is a collection of 24 reminiscences and impressions from friends, students and acquaintances of C. S. Lewis – the famed creator of the Narnia tales. The book is edited by James T. Como, founding member of the New York C. S. Lewis Society.
The book provides a glimpse of how C.S. Lewis’ own experiences provided snippets that grew into a beloved classic, and most recently into the Narnia movie to be released by Disney in early December 2005. This volume is for the casual and serious student of Lewis because its readable essays take a step beyond biography to original sources with personal anecdotes and thoughts. Lewis died in 1963, on the same day as President John F. Kennedy and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley.
“The singular authority of this collection derives from one central fact – all but two contributors (one of them being the editor) were personally acquainted with Lewis,” Como notes.
‘The man who created Narnia’ would have been quite at home in his mythical world, because as friends recall in the book, C.S. Lewis cut an “egg-shaped” figure who managed to dress quite shabbily even in a new suit, loved country rambles and wild creatures, and detested artifice and intolerance.
Chronicles begins as the four children step through the back of a wardrobe closet in England in the midst of World War II, into a world frozen by the White Witch, populated by mythical animals and creatures; a place where Good and Evil battle and the children’s own moral struggles play a role in rescuing Narnia.
Renowned as one of the great 20th-century defenders of Christianity, Lewis in The Chronicles of Narnia fulfills first and foremost his own advice as related by one of the essayists in James Como’s book: “The first duty of an author is to entertain.”
“Lewis confessed to drawing many ideas for scenes and characters in his stories from mind pictures that came to him either waking or asleep,” related his friend Roger Lancelyn Green whose assistance Lewis acknowledged on the Narnian tales. In fact, Lewis felt his dreams about lions at the time of writing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, are what may have brought the powerful Christ-like figure of Aslan into being, Green writes.
A prolific, learned and accessible author, a bachelor who found love in his 50s, Lewis was a tutor to university students for 30 years and a friend to many. His friend, theologian Austin Farrer writes that Lewis corresponded in his own hand with readers who wrote him from all over the world. “His characteristic attitude to people in general was one of consideration and respect. He did his best for them, and he appreciated them. He paid you the compliment of attending to your words. He did not pretend to read your heart,” Farrer writes.
So too, Lewis maintained his own reserve, only briefly allowing most friends an inkling of his personal life, recalled several essayists.
Readers of this book and fans of Narnia will quickly see how the man who was Clive S. Lewis-“Jack” to his friends-was a generous, imaginative, yet razor-sharp moralist and philosopher whose world view is translated into a world that rivets, charms, and disarms. At the same time, essayist after essayist relates Lewis’s personal quirks.
Clifford Morris, a minister who drove Lewis during the last years of life and accompanied Lewis on many of his walks in the English countryside, writes that he picked up Lewis at the nursing home the night his wife Joy died, and thus was the first to see him after the hospital staff.
“He did not wish to go straight home, and so we sat in the car and talked-for a long time. We talked about the things that good friends do talk about on such occasions, and I shall always count it a privilege to have seen-and shared, in some measure-his Christian faith,” Morris said.
Famous for his mastery of logic and language, Lewis’s disregard for his clothing and regular misplacing of his hat was almost as legendary. At one point a week after a walk, Morris and Lewis found Lewis’s hat under a hedge “being used as a home for field mice. Jack retrieved it of course and continued to wear it.”
“This book…of Lewis is richly varied in perspective, length, intimacy, and elegance about one of the arguably greatest Christian thinkers and writers of all time,” says Peter Kreeft, Ph.D., author of C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium. “They invite you in, and make you feel like a friend of C.S. Lewis.”
Joseph Pearce, world-renowned literary biographer and author of C. S. Lewis and The Catholic Church, says Como’s book is “an invaluable, indeed an indispensable, addition to the burgeoning sphere of Lewis scholarship.”