1965 Prophecy Fulfilled

A letter from Christopher Derrick

CHRISTOPHER DERRICK’S assessment of the manuscript draft (1965) of Warren Lewis’s Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966) is preserved in the Geoffrey Bles collection of Lewis material in the Bodleian Library, Dep. c. 774. It has proved to be a prescient preview of A. N. Wilson’s 1990 Lewis biography.

“Lewis was a great man, with certain psychological (not moral or spiritual) weaknesses: owing chiefly to his sensitivity and consideration for others, the effects of those weaknesses bulked in a very large disproportionate way in the external arrangements of his life. It would be very difficult indeed — perhaps impossible — to tell the full story without causing the sardonic world (very anxious indeed to gloat over the personal weaknesses of a declared contentious Christian and moralist) to see only feet of clay that are in fact barely there at all.

“W.H.L.’s approach in the present MS. will only heighten the effect. The world will see two small scared boys coerced into a dream-world by their mother’s death and their father’s lunatic tyranny: it will interpret Lewis’s long obsessive submissions to Mrs. King [sic] in Freudian terms, exaggerating this in Oedipal and incestuous directions: it will relish W.H.L.’s obvious (though firmly denied) jealousy: encouraged by certain passages in Screwtape, The Great Divorce, and even A Grief Observed, it will work out (to its own satisfaction) a crudely vulgarised version of Lewis’s marriage, and a general picture of a weak man masochistically hag-ridden by a pathological need for female domination. And it will use this picture (again, on classically Freudian lines) as the basis for a dismissive explanation of Lewis’s religion.”

“W.H.L. (not to mention Hooper) is too closely involved, I think: the last thing he would want would be to give anybody a pretext for dismissing his brother as a psychopath living in a dream-world. And he wasn’t that.”