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Is the London Telegraph Down on C. S. Lewis?

The Lewis Legacy-Issue 80, Spring 1999 The C.S. Lewis Foundation for Truth in Publishing

Two Autumn 1998 Attacks

CHARLOTTE CORY SAYS SHE LOVED the Narnian Chronicles as a child, until she learned she had been “conned” by a Christian allegory. On Saturday, 19 September 1998 the Telegraph published her full-page article titled “The woman who drew Narnia” celebrating Pauline Baynes. Cory obviously has little respect for Lewis (“hypocritical”), but immense respect for Baynes.

The article is illustrated with a superb photo of Baynes, one of her drawings of Jadis (strangely titled “which craft”), and a standard photo of Lewis. But according to Cory, Lewis cared nothing about illustrations and only pretended to like those by Baynes. Baynes’s only vivid memory of Lewis is that when no one wanted more brussels sprouts at a luncheon he hosted, he gleefully picked the walnuts out of the dish and ate them. Tolkien comes off far better in this article, because to Corey his Christianity seemed ‘more rooted and unobtrusive”.

On November 14, two months after the full-page Baynes article, one by A. N. Wilson appeared, titled “The problem of C S Lewis.” Wilson begins, “The C S lewis Centenary — he was born on November 29, 1898 — is a high festival for evengelical Christians of a certain temper, for American right-wingers of a particular, numerous and vociferous variety, and for children, or ex-children, who have been enchanted by his cycle of stories about Narnia, that imagined land beyond the wardrobe. Understandably, given the partisan colouring of the Lewisites, he has received a measure of abuse.”

Wilson explains, “I used to be the sort of wishy-washy, half-believing churchgoer that Lewis so much despised. Writing his biography 10 years ago turned me into a very definite non-believer. Of Lewis’s immediate circle, his life-companion for 30 years, Janie Moore, was an atheist; his oldest schoolfriend and correspondent turned from being a believer to being a sceptic; even those who shared his beliefs, such as J R R Tolkien, complained of ’embarrassment’ when the subject of religion arose.” (Wilson implies that close acquaintance with Lewis reveals the bankruptcy of his religion. Greeves was never a schoolfriend, but that’s the least of the faults in this misrepresentation. )

Wilson’s point is that the C. S. Lewis worth celebrating, the literary scholar, “has been largely forgotten by the Holy Rollers, the children’s literature addicts and the slighty creepy Americans who seem to have made up some virginal or non-smoking Lewis in their own image….

“Most, if not all, of these fantasy projections would have horrified the real C S Lewis, just as much as they embarrass (or amuse) his pupils, friends and those who know anything about him.”

After a graceful overview of some of Lewis’s scholarly concerns, Wilson concludes with more bombast and portrayal himself as Lewis’s defender and the reader’s friend. “It is one of the strange paradoxes that Lewis himself should have been Disneyfied by the Americans or those European Protestants who follow the purely American Evangelical Creed…. By all means love Narnia. Ignore the Holy Roller books — they are an embarrassment. Re-read and savour English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama and revere a man who, whatever his faults, held a flickering lantern against the coming dark.”

As part of his entertaining fantasy projections about American readers of Lewis, Wilson accuses them of having fantasy projections. He claims that these American fantasy projections embarrass or amuse people who know anything about Lewis, when in fact his own fantasy projections embarrass or amuse people who know anything about Wilson.

In his grandiose concluding flourish, Wilson is obviously thumbing his nose at gullible newspaper readers. “Re-read and savour” a daunting 696-page tome? I can almost hear Screwtape whispering this strategem into Wilson’s ear: “Advise the general public to start with the OHEL volume. That will simultaneously impress them with your intelligence and good will toward Lewis and discourage them from reading Lewis.”

Lewis’s unnamed “Holy Roller books” must be an embarrassment, all right. An embarrassment to A. N. Wilson and to Screwtape.