In C. S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, released by Harper Collins in the fall of 1996, Walter Hooper abruptly reverses his claim that Lewis’s Grief Observed is fiction. (See pp. 194-201.) Without any explanation, he includes Grief in his autobiography section and vouches for its historical accuracy. Until now Hooper has always insisted that Grief is strictly imaginative and that Read More ›
In C.S. Lewis: Companion and Guide, careful readers find a few surprising inclusions and omissions. For example, Hooper tells about the Miramar Hotel in Boomemouth where the Tolkiens stayed on vacations, and lists it in his index -although it has nothing to do with Lewis. He gives an entire paragraph to the life of Fritz Gasch who married Lewis’s illustrator Read More ›
6. Rehabilitations and Other Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1939). Essays on literature and education. Long unavailable except from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor. In Xerographic edition. Contents:”Shelley, Dryden and Mr. Eliot,” ‘William Morris.” “The Idea of an ‘English School,”‘ “Our English Syllabus,” “High and Low Brows,” “The Alliterative Metre,” “Bluspels and Flalanspheres: A Semantic Nightmare,” “Variations In Shakespeare and Others.” Read More ›
Gordon Monson, The Los Angeles Times, 8 December 1992 Psychiatrists say compulsive liars one researcher estimates they account for up to 5% of the population suffer from a personality disorder that leads them not just to tell lies but to try to live those lies as well. “A lot of these people try to rewrite their personal history,” says Bryan Read More ›
Walter Hooper’s 1991 essay “C.S. Lewis: The Man and His Thought” is largely a collection of Hooper’s anecdotes old and new. “…I became ‘The Soldier Who Had Heard from C.S. Lewis’ ….” After ringing the doorbell of the Kilns, “My heart was beating so hard I had to lean against the wall.” “It was this joke [concerning Lewis’s bathroom], as Read More ›
More on Lewis on Dante On 22 November 1931 C.S. Lewis wrote to Warren: “Other standing engagements are on Thursday when a man called Hardie (another English don] comes and reads Dante with me, and every second Monday when the college literary society meets.” (Lewis also expressed his opinion of writers like Dante: “To read histories of literature, one would Read More ›
From Warren Lewis to an American Correspondent (Ralph Blair recently purchased Mr. Lofstrom’s set of Lewis letters from a dealer.) [In Upper right corner] SI, Ringwood Rd.,Risinghurst,Headington,Oxford. 12th January 1967. Dear Mr. Lofstrom, Many thanks for your kind and encouraging letter of the 9th. It gives me real pleasure to know that you and Mrs. Lofstrom have got something out Read More ›
Lewis on Psychotherapy “I certainly had not realized from your previous letter how distressing the problem was; my allusion to the psychotherapists was a fling at the increasing modern habit of seeing all personal difficulties in terms of disease and cure, and so reducing things that are really moral or intellectual or both to the pathological element. In your own Read More ›
At Lewis’s funeral service in 1963 his friend Austin Farrer paid this tribute to him: “It was this feeling intellect, this intellectual imagination, which made the strength of his religious writings … His real power was not proof, it was depiction. There lived in his writings a Christian universe which could be both thought and felt, in which he was Read More ›
SHELDON VANAUKEN LEGACY: BOOKS AND CORRESPONDENCE Sheldon Vanauken, who died at home in Lynchburg, Virginia on 28 October 1996, was a personal friend of C. S. Lewis. He was also an amazingly generous, succinct, and lively correspondent, who often said more on one postcard than others say on two full pages. (His neat, tiny script and abbreviations were easy to Read More ›