On a recent Friday night, 30 fans of the writer C. S. Lewis sat in folding chairs under a vaulted ceiling surrounded by gilt-framed oil paintings of Episcopal priests. Like Lucy Pevensie, the youngest of the four children in Lewis’s book “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” who opens a wardrobe to discover the icy land of Narnia, the members of the New York C. S. Lewis Society immerse themselves in the writer’s fantastical realm.
Members of the group, which calls itself the oldest society in the world for the appreciation of Lewis’s works, gather on the second Friday of every month in the parish hall of the Church of the Ascension at 12 West 11th Street in Greenwich Village.
Among those at the latest meeting were Margaret Goodman, 70, an opera singer and actress who wore a small golden lion pin, and Christopher Mitchell, the director of the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College in Illinois, which has the world’s largest holding of papers and books by Lewis.
The society’s secretary, Clara Sarrocco, 60, traces her obsession to when she was 16, attending a Catholic high school in Queens, where she lives. “One of my teachers came in and mentioned a book written from one demon to another demon,” she said of Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters.” “Real diabolical-sounding.”
When she was in her 20s, Ms. Sarrocco clipped an advertisement for the society from a magazine. “I stuck it in my mirror,” she said. “Every time I looked in the mirror, I kept on saying, ‘I have to go there.’ I was a little intimidated.”
But her curiosity won out. Since the early 1970s, Ms. Sarrocco has been part of the society, which has about 500 subscribers to its twice-a-month bulletin from across the country and abroad, including Japan, Germany, Russia and England.
Lewis, who was born in Ireland in 1898, was a leading figure on the English faculty at Oxford University and was part of a literary group there known as the Inklings, which included J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the “Lord of the Rings” books.
The Lewis society’s longest active members are a married couple, Alexandra and James Como. He is a Lewis scholar and the chairman of the Department of Performing and Fine Arts at York College in Jamaica, Queens, part of the City University of New York.
[Read the rest at the New York Times.]
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