A N Wilson C S Lewis Critical Review
C.South. Lewis: A Biography past A.N. Wilson
My rating: 2 of v stars
If this were a drinking political party instead of a volume, A.N. Wilson'southward C.S. Lewis: A Biography would be a five-star story. Humorous, calorie-free in tone, deftly written, the life of C.S. Lewis told hither is engaging, moving, and poignant. Unfortunately, this was not a night effectually the dinner table, picking and eating and drinking and talking almost this Oxford don that our new friend Wilson had met one time. It is a book that purports to be a biography simply has the unfortunate condition of not beingness terribly accurate.
You tin can see a list of errata by Kathryn Lindskoog here. The list is as telling about C.Southward. Lewis studies as it is about Wilson's piece of work. Many Lewis fans will have rejected the volume because it has damning or pulp things in it, and because it drifts toward the Freudian, psychoanalytic view of history. I don't pass up it out of manus for these reasons provided there can be sufficient show that the writer can bring us truthfully into the history of the moment.
Wilson'due south smoking jacket old boys club approach to biographical approach to storytelling, though, left me with no confidence whatever that I could either trust his business relationship where biographers differ, or that I could test his hypothesis. The errata is part of it. Even when you take out the protectionistic and interpretive bits, there are simply dozens of errors. As Arend Smilde coyly noted in his much more consummate review of the book,
"Wilson might have been practising a kind of biography which is legitimate in its ain fashion but which I take not yet learnt to appreciate" (run across here).
I will surmise what that technique is beneath, just nosotros should watch as Smilde goes on to list pages of errors that we can carve up into rough categories: ane) error of fact due to sloppiness; 2) error of estimation due to uncareful weighing of evidence; 3) concerns or errors due to the fact that Wilson's bear witness is based on hearsay, gossip, or private conversations non open to historical testing; and four) places where Wilson simply simply seems aptitude against a sensible or evidence-based estimation.
These categories are a bit puzzling to me as I have read Wilson'southward biographies on St. Paul and Tolstoy. I enjoyed Tolstoy, though I know nearly nothing about the figure. I have done a masters caste on Paul, however, and that book made me angry at times. Equally scholars nosotros make biographical and historical choices based on the all-time of our reading, and hopefully proceed checking our biases. Wilson'due south bio of Paul simply slalomed through, grabbing the best estimation from scholars to adjust his purposes. It was a frustrating read, but what makes his bio of Lewis so different is that the Paul bio was pretty well researched for a popular biographer'south piece of work. This Lewis biography was not well researched, leaving out the most important biography of the generation: Jack: A Life of C.S. Lewis by George Sayer, Lewis' student and friend. This makes me wonder if Wilson'due south Lewis book is a bit of a gap in his must stronger (though still controversial) piece of work.
I won't repeat the errors in the text–not merely because others accept done that with startling attention to item, but also considering I just actually enjoyed reading this book. To exist fair, this was my "jammed betwixt the seats of the car to read while I'm waiting for things book" volume. It is a special category of book, made up of a soft-cover text that can hold a pencil, nigh 300-350 pages so it sits nicely betwixt the seats, i that I tin can both hold the story together in my head and one I don't mind taking two or 3 years to read. Because I read it in such small segments, and considering my expectations were low, I never got really angry at any one point. It was an entertaining read that filled time in the dentist's part or the garage or while waiting for the traffic behind the water main suspension to menstruation again.
It is non, however, the first or concluding biography of C.S. Lewis anyone should read. That is, of grade, if you are thinking of history. Wilson himself admits equally much to the reader afterwards more than 300 pages that
C. S. Lewis has become a mythological figure, and it has therefore seemed legitimate to some to retell his story without as well much regard for empirical evidence, just as poets have told and retold the tales of Greek or Norse mythology (306).
And that's it, right in that location. This is a iv-star or v-star mythology, but a pretty poor biography. I love mythology, but I call up A.N. Wilson is existence unjust to readers who buy his book and has got the work of an amateur mythographer where they expected the work of a professional biographer.
To honour the belatedly-night story feeling of the book, though, I call back sharing a few points worth pondering when we are feeling speculative could be fun (or infuriating):
"Most of Lewis's important experiences were, in fact, literary ones" (44, is this true? Perhaps not, but a great quote).
"How much is the bookish homo distinguishable from his imagined self, the self he projects into the books he reads?" (45, annotation, Wilson uses "project" a lot this practiced, at least a half-dozen times to pose this question, unfortunately not doing the historical work to answer information technology; at least as many times Wilson suggests Lewis is obssessed with i thing or another).
"It has become customary for those who write almost Lewis to speak of his fondness for Mrs Moore and the domestic routines in which she involved him every bit a tyranny which he endured with a martyr's patience. Almost any domestic routine which involves more than than 1 person tin can exist viewed in this light; and information technology is unquestionable that Mrs Moore was a demanding companion whose desire for Lewis to be involved in the smallest item of her life did not diminish with the years. But though she may accept given him more than he bargained for, it would be unfair to her memory to deny that she was providing something which he very much needed and wanted" (72, at that place really is a villainization of Mrs. Moore in some circles, largely considering of Warren Lewis' feelings about her).
"The feeling abroad was that English language was not really a man's subject – more than suitable for girls. Information technology was too nebulous in its intellectual range. Criticism equally a pseudo-science had scarcely begun and when it did so, in other universities, it was not welcomed at Oxford. English Literature was studied there, in Lewis'southward time as an undergraduate, from a relentlessly philological and historical bespeak of view" (76, and so reading is a girls game, words a boys ane).
"Tolkien was by temperament a very different man from Lewis. He could be touchy and irritable; Lewis could be advised and tactless. There was a touch of elfish melancholy, as well every bit of delicacy, in Tolkien which would never respond to the broader outlines of Lewis's essentially sunny disposition. Lewis would not have guessed that Tolkien'due south Lay would remain unfinished. Information technology must have seemed clear to him at in one case that Tolkien was a human being of literary genius, and this fact merely brought home to him his ain sense of failure equally a writer. 'From the age of sixteen onwards, I had one single ambition, from which I never wavered, in the prosecution of which I spent every ounce I could, on which I really and deliberately staked my whole contentment; and I recognise myself as having unmistakeably failed in information technology.'9 He knew that as yet the appropriate mode eluded him. He knew neither what to write nor how to write information technology. In Tolkien, by huge contrast, he met a human being whose fashion had been with him from the beginning" (119).
"Similar many sexually naive people, Lewis supposed that if he eliminated the consciously erotic elements of his sexuality from the surface of life, he would be able to dispel the habits and characteristics of which these detail tastes were a mere symptom. Peradventure if he had worried less nigh them, and taken a less self-reproachful line, the outlines of his personality would have softened with the years. Perhaps, too, if they had known almost his 'tastes', his friends would have been less puzzled by 2 of his most mysterious personality traits: his delight in verbal bullying, of students or intellectual opponents, and his apparently cheerful domestic enslavement to Mrs Moore" (129).
"The Discarded Image is a book which was written by a human with an unusual sensitivity to the differences between past and present. The men and women of the past saw the aforementioned physical universe that we did, but their way of seeing it was quite different; their mode of describing it in written course more than different yet. This does not mean that the erstwhile books can provide us with no concrete evidence from the past, but it does mean that former books must be read with delicacy; with a sense that if we get unmeant into them, assuming that they mean what we mean by words like sky, earth, history or nature we shall go everything wrong. If we read the book in their way – whether we are reading Dante, or Chaucer, or Isadore of Seville – we volition get something from it. The more nosotros soak upwardly their way of looking at things, their method of understanding, the more nosotros shall get. Read it in our mode and we shall merely be, as Lewis says in the preface to The Discarded Image, like 'travellers who carry their resolute Englishry with them all over the Continent, mix only with other English language tourists, savor all they come across for its "quaintness" and have no wish to realise what those ways of life, those churches, those vineyards hateful to the natives'.fifteen Every bit an apologist, he seems totally blind to the fact that the New Testament is merely such a drove of onetime books, which require, if we are to understand them aright, patience and a willingness to listen to scholars who have meditated for a long fourth dimension on the nature of the (often quite puzzling and contradictory) material which they comprise" (164).
"Lewis never lost his schoolboyish sense of wonder and enjoyment. It is what makes him such a refreshing literary historian" (173).
"To the comedy of such pen-portraits (and Screwtape, it has to be admitted, is a roughshod book), is added moral wisdom and a developing religious vision. Lewis is extremely skillful at describing the actual territory in which the moral life, for most of us, is thrashed out, and the extent to which nosotros enable ourselves to be deluded about ourselves and other people" (177).
"It is not whimsical to say that Narnia is the inside of Lewis's mind, peopled with a rich enjoyment of old books and old stories and the beauties of nature, but e'er threatened by a terrible sense of loss, of beloved's frailty" (221).
"The Experiment [in Criticism] ends with one of the finest paragraphs in the whole Lewis œuvre" (289).
"a taste for Lewis is, in large office, a sense of taste for reading about him. Though it was denied him to become a great poet, he shares with 'the last Romantics' a bright awareness of his own consciousness, a sense that the main stop of writing is to communicate sensation and experience" (290).
Lewis "himself as a writer is then constantly accessible and interesting considering he is unashamed of the story-telling element in all literary modes" (291).
"Physical extinction was a perpetual nightmare to him and, whatever his theological convictions and hopes, he was unable, before his wife'due south death, to reconcile himself to the transition which death must inevitably entail" (293, I would dear to see evidence of that).
"The disputes between scholars and the guardians of C. S. Lewis's memory are unedifying, merely they reverberate something much more than than a learned fence or a purely mercenary desire to lay hands on valuable manuscripts. Indeed, despite the claims of cynics, mere would appear to have been very fiddling element of forehandedness in these wrangles. What was emerging was a profound departure of imaginative views of rival mythologies" nigh C.South. Lewis (303-four).
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Source: https://apilgriminnarnia.com/2019/02/11/a-n-wilsons-c-s-lewis-a-mythology/