Product Description

This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the brilliant, prolific writer, C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis was a deeply complex man, capable of inspiring both great devotion and great hostility. This acclaimed biography charts the progress of the clever child from the 'Little End Room' of his Ulster childhood and adult life, exploring Lewis's unwilling conversion to Christianity, the genesis of his writing, and the web of his relationships.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #87510 in Books
• Published on: 2005-11-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
'The more biography he writes, the better he gets -- his life of C. S. Lewis is his best yet. It's a vivacious and compassionate book. Wilson's range of interests -- religious, literary, human-gossipy and Oxfordian -- make him an ideal match for the subject.' Andrew Motion, Observer 'Passionate, perspicacious, funny and inevitably partisan.' Selina Hastings, Telegraph 'Wilson's biography is admirable, probably the best imaginable ... Mr Wilson is a brilliant biographer.' Anthony Burgess, Independent 'It seems fitting that A. N. Wilson should now have written the definitive biography of Lewis, and it is a superb job.' John Bayley, Guardian

Evening Standard
'scrupulously level-headed, not to mention sane, sharp and witty'

About the Author
A. N. Wilson was born in 1950 and educated at Rugby and New College, Oxford. He was a lecturer at St Hugh's College and New College from 1976 to 1981, and was then appointed Literary Editor of the Spectator. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1981. His novels include The Sweets of Pimlico, The Healing Art, Wise Virgin and biographies of Walter Scott, Milton and Tolstoy.

Customer Reviews

Not Good Even for Irony
There is great, though, as it turns out, pointless, irony in the fact that the litterateur A. N. Wilson penned this life of a famous Christian apologist while he was in the process of giving up his own Christian faith. One might anticipate from such a juxtaposition some unusual insight into Lewis' (in this case unsuccessful) methods of argumentation. Alas, nothing of the sort occurs. This is simply another Lewis biography, following the familiar outline laid down by Lewis' own "Surprised by Joy" and adding very little, save for catty psychological guesswork, that has not appeared in earlier productions of the prolific Lewis "industry".

The book's great sensation is the assertion that the young Lewis, at around age 20, had an affair with Mrs. Jane Moore, the woman whom he "adopted" as a mother figure for the rest of his life. The theory, borrowed without acknowledgement from the eccentric American Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog (whom Wilson repays with unfair derision), lacks both plausibility and evidence. Lewis had lost his mother at a young age and had chafed under his father's well-meant but wrong-headed tutelage. Mrs. Moore's son, for a while Lewis' closest friend, had died in the Great War. That the two should have formed a substitute family is not at all surprising. Wilson offers no grounds for supposing that the relationship was sexual. Instead, he offers "evidence" of this sort: Lewis' diaries use the Greek letter delta (our "D") as shorthand for Mrs. Moore. Of the many Greek words and names beginning with that letter, he singles out "Diotimia", from whom the Socrates of Plato's "Symposium" is supposed to have learned his theories about eros. That is just a wild guess, evidently made without knowledge of the fact that delta is the first letter of the Greek transliteration of "Jane". (Our "j" sound is not native to the Greek language but can be represented by the diphthong delta-zeta.)

Wilson's major weakness as a biographer is... his incurious, intellectually lazy approach to a field already tilled by many predecessors. A life that looked at Lewis from a different angle, that, for instance, probed his pre-Christian philosophical opinions and asked to what extent they truly changed as a result of his conversion or that placed his apologetics next to the works (Wells, Huxley, Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin et al.) against which he was reacting or that gave adequate attention to his professional literary interests, could have been a fresh and vivid portrait. One that accepts prior interpretations with a few unflattering twists is not.

There is no point in writing a biography simply in order to say what has been said before - not even if one says it with slightly more elegance and now and then taxes the subject for his failure to anticipate politically correct points of view. As a compendium of bare facts, sprinkled with factoids, Wilson's book is acceptable, but it is hard to imagine a reason for anybody to seek it out.

Spiteful and mean spirited, but good on the lit crit.
This book deserves two stars for its excellent sections which concern CS Lewis as a literary critic.

Aside from this it is a nasty book, which runs-down Lewis both directly and insidiously: AN Wilson has since acknowledged that he thoroughly-disliked what he discovered of Lewis, and presumably found writing this book an unpleasant chore. It shows.

There is a good critique at: [...]

George Sayers's biography 'Jack' is much better - 4 stars.

THE DEVIL�S ADVOCATE RIDES OUT
A. N. Wilson, who never met Lewis, wants to save him from sainthood, and feels that previous biographers have been too adulatory. I suspect he also feels that Lewis is only properly understood by fellow literati. He wants to balance things up, and I happily admit that there is merit in this aim. Unfortunately, the merit is far outweighed by the demerits of his method and the factual inaccuracy of this book. I am strongly reminded of the position in which John Betjeman's biographer, Bevis Hillier found himself. He tells us that he decided to avoid producing a 'critical biography', which is an illegitimate art-form, as it 'yokes together historical narrative and literary criticism'. This is Wilson's error, and he compounds it with his own repetitious and subjective brand of psychoanalysis. It is as if he cannot restrict himself to any one role, or even a coherent set of roles. He wants to be an honest broker, iconoclast, Devil's Advocate, psychoanalyst, literary critic, and historian by turns. He fails.

To me it seems that Wilson's best remarks are made when he is in literary-critical mode. I can actually recognise Lewis's book 'The Allegory of Love' from the description given. However, Wilson's fatal habit cannot help but ruin it by the addition of a florid Freudian excursus at the end. Against this slight virtue, the Lewis I know from his autobiography, diaries, and other biographies appears as a caricature.

George Sayer wrote a biography of Lewis entitled 'Jack': he was a pupil of Lewis, and a good friend. As this friendship lasted twenty-nine years, he was a hundred times more qualified than Wilson to write a biography. Sayer was so stung by the unfairness of Wilson's book that he responded with an updated introduction to his own biography. Although Sayer does not baulk at concluding that the pre-Christian Lewis and Mrs Moore were indeed lovers, he does defend him against Wilson calumnies in foursquare style. As a Christian Lewis was not known to drink heavily; he did not encourage others to drink too much; Wilson does not have taped testimony from Douglas Gresham about Lewis's bedroom behaviour with Joy Davidman, etc. In short, if the Christian Lewis (he converted around the age of thirty) were half as bad as Wilson makes out, his reputation would have been poor long before this biographer set poison pen to paper. Insinuation and semi-attributable quotation is hard to refute simply. But then strong claims require strong proof, and he simply fails to produce it.

For myself I will rest content with refuting four errors on the first page of Wilson's preface. He says that the Narnia books are in a 'rough hewn style'. I think he is the first to discover this in fifty years - is there a rough-hewn chapter or page in them? He says that Lewis 'did not mix in the world, with famous or fashionable people'. I suppose JRR Tolkien (Lord of the Rings), John Betjeman (Poet Laureate), Sir Peter Medawar (Nobel prize, biology), and Billy Graham, are not meant to count. He says that Lewis was 'deliberately at variance with the twentieth century'. But if he could only make a case that Lewis would have actually agreed with lies, sexual immorality, injustice, subjectivism, Marxism, and liberal theology in any other century this might be a point worth making. Finally, he says that 'religions have collapsed' in the twentieth century. He fails to notice the rise of the modern 'supermarket' approach to spiritual things - Feng Shui, Star Wars, the Pentecostal/charismatic movement, house churches, 'New Age' paganism, the Bahai faith, and the many cults that pop up like mushrooms. Far from dying out, it's a free-market 'pick your own' situation now. He should exit left pursued by a bear.