With the flood of C. S. Lewis books timed to capitalize on Disney's release of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, readers awash in the deluge may be forgiven a certain amount of cynicism. While it may be hyperbole to call such marketing a Narnian frenzy, the truism "Lewis sells" is being eagerly exploited by publishers determined not to miss their chance to turn a profit. Thankfully Alan Jacobs' The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis is one of the better offerings amid the flotsam, combining fine scholarship with winsome writing to produce what may be called a critical biography—that is, a careful reading of Lewis' oeuvre with an eye for how it may comment upon his imaginative life. This is not hagiography nor a definitive biography (it never set out to be), but it is an important contribution to Lewisian biography drawing extensively upon the massive work of Walter Hooper in the first two volumes of Lewis' Collected Letters. In addition, Jacobs cites from but does not depend upon Lewis' autobiography, Surprised by Joy, and the earlier biographies of A. N. Wilson, Walter Hooper and Roger L. Green, and George Sayer; some eyebrows will be raised by any use of the Wilson biography, but Jacobs rightly discerns when Wilson is worth citing and when he is patently ill-informed.

Jacobs' biography is guided by his

belief that Lewis's mind was above all characterized by a willingness to be enchanted, and it was this openness to enchantment that held together the various strands of his life; his delight in laughter, his willingness to accept a world made by a good and loving God, and (in some ways above all) his willingness to submit to the charms of a wonderful story—whether written by an Italian poet of the sixteenth century, or by Beatrix Potter, or by himself.

Because of this willingness to be enchanted, Jacobs argues, "Lewis's imagination was a transforming one: he took the people he knew and loved, the great events he experienced, the books he read, and swept them all together into the great complicated manifold world of Narnia. … He was a Narnian long before he knew what name to give that country; it was his true homeland, the native ground to which he hoped, one day, to return." At the same time, while Jacobs does discuss in specific ways how this plays itself out in the Narnian stories, his approach is not systematic—that is, he does not devote chapters to each of the Narnian books; instead he integrates discussions of Narnia into chapters offering a chronological telling of Lewis' life.

Likewise, he does not offer a systematic discussion of Lewis' imagination as illustrated in all his books; rather, he is judiciously selective. For instance, he is excellent in his discussions of The Abolition of Man and That Hideous Strength. He calls the former "the most profound of Lewis's cultural critiques," noting that the educational theorists Lewis attacks in the book have unwittingly promoted an "infernal pedagogy: by insisting that our feelings are mere preferences—none of which can be greater or more valuable than another—they open the way for dark forces to conduct their own campaign of education in the values of Hell." Jacobs then augments this discussion by showing how Lewis imaginatively uses the latter book to illustrate the literary application of such an infernal pedagogy, primarily through the character Mark Studdock, who only at the last moment realizes he has become a "man without a chest" as a result of his manipulation by the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments (n.i.c.e.). When Jacobs applies this to Narnia, he exposes Uncle Andrew's rhetoric from The Magician's Nephew as garden-variety moral relativism; as Digory observes, "All it means … is that he thinks he can do anything he likes to get anything he wants." In fact, along with his discussions of The Pilgrim's Regress, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, and English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Excluding Drama), Jacobs offers one of the best discussions of Lewis' critique of modernity that I have read. Jacobs is also very perceptive in his discussion of the Inklings, particularly Lewis' relationship with Tolkien. While noting Lewis' spiritual debt to Tolkien—it was a long evening conversation with Tolkien and Hugo Dyson on September 19, 1931, that Lewis noted as key to his eventual movement to faith in Christ—Jacobs also highlights Tolkien's early affection for Lewis. For example, Tolkien confided in his diary: "Friendship with Lewis compensates for much, and besides giving constant pleasure and comfort has done me much good from the contact with a man at once honest, brave, intellectual—a scholar, a poet, and a philosopher—and a lover, at least after a long pilgrimage, of Our Lord." Jacobs rightly points out how often and with what enthusiasm Lewis encouraged Tolkien to persevere in his writing of the books that eventually became The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. At the same time, Jacobs suggests the later cooling of Tolkien's affection toward Lewis had to do with the writing of the Narnian stories; Tolkien, ever the perfectionist, wrote and re-wrote his stories, intent on offering a coherent and integrated mythology. Accordingly, he found the hodge-podge collection of imaginative characters in Narnia—dryads, dwarves, werewolves, witches, and even Father Christmas—repugnant. Jacobs also suggests that the popular success of the Narnian stories may have led to jealousy on the part of Tolkien.

On the matter of Lewis' relationship with Mrs. Moore, the woman he lived with after his return from the trenches in World War I until her death in 1951, Jacobs, like earlier biographers, is limited by the dearth of primary documents regarding this relationship. Although he concludes that Lewis took seriously his pledge to Paddy Moore to care for his mother if he did not survive the war and notes that she, like Lewis, was from Ireland, Jacobs, with one exception, adds little to the speculations of earlier biographers. Lewis himself precluded insight here, noting in Surprised by Joy about his return to Oxford in 1919: "But before I say anything of my life there I must warn the reader that one huge and complex episode will be omitted. I have no choice about this reticence … Even were I free to tell the story, I doubt if it has much to do with the subject of the book." Jacobs' intriguing speculation is that Mrs. Moore may have served as the model for Orual, the domineering, possessive, self-deceived central character of Lewis' greatest work of fiction, Till We Have Faces. Jacobs also has little new to say about Lewis' late marriage to Joy Gresham, although he does faithfully recount the genesis of their relationship and is sympathetic to Joy—something not universally shared by other biographers. His writing about their relationship, while brief, is poignant and captures well the tenderness, love, affliction, and grief Lewis experienced. There are flaws in Jacobs' biography. One is a minor stylistic distraction—his frequent use of parenthetical expressions promising readers more detail on the topic under discussion or longer parenthetical passages containing information that could either easily be included in the main text or assigned to footnotes. More troubling is his failure to explore in depth the critical role Lewis' aspirations to be a poet had upon his imaginative life. Until Lewis was twenty-six, his central literary passion was to become a poet. Owen Barfield said that if you knew Lewis in Oxford in the early 1920s, you knew him as someone who wanted to become a great poet. Moreover, while Jacobs does mention that Lewis' first two published works were volumes of poetry, Spirits in Bondage (1919) and Dymer (1926), he expends little energy discussing them or showing how Lewis' dedication to verse later contributed to his imaginative gifts as a prose writer.

The point here is not that Lewis was a great poet—although he was certainly much better than Jacobs suggests—but rather that, in a biography which claims to focus upon Lewis' imagination, it is a critical oversight to give such short shrift to Lewis' poetic aspiration. His early letters to his father, Albert, and his great friend, Arthur Greeves, are peppered with references not only to his reading great poets, including Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, and Wordsworth, but also to his earnest efforts at writing both lyrical and narrative verse. In addition, he wrote and published poems until the last year of his life, a body of verse totaling over 300 poems. This lifelong dedication to poetry finds wonderful expression in Lewis' prose, so much so that some of his best prose is marked by passages of poetic prose, including Mere Christianity, The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, A Grief Observed, and large portions of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and the Chronicles of Narnia. Indeed, while Lewis' imaginative success as a poet may have been constrained by his careful attention to poetic conventions—meter, rhyme, and stanziac patterns—his imagination was liberated by the relative formlessness of prose.

Despite these flaws, The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis is a worthy addition to Lewisian biography. In addition to the strengths already cited, Jacobs' final chapter is a spirited exposé of the wooly-headed, specious, and mean-spirited attacks on Lewis by Philip Hensher ("Let us drop C. S. Lewis and his ghastly, priggish, half-witted, money-making drivel about Narnia down the nearest deep hole, as soon as conveniently possible") and Philip Pullman (regarding Narnia: "Death is better than life; boys are better than girls; light-coloured people are better than dark-coloured people; and so on. There is no shortage of such nauseating drivel in Narnia, if you can face it"). As Jacobs deftly notes, it is not Lewis' limitation as a literary craftsman that irks Hensher and Pullman: "It is his insistence that people are immortal. It is Lewis's holding to—and more, emphasizing—the Christian promise of eternal life that makes Hensher accuse him of 'doctrinaire bullying' and Pullman accuse him of believing that 'death is better than life.'"

Jacobs concludes the book by citing Kenneth Tynan, the flamboyant British dramatist, director, screenwriter, critic, and essayist, who had Lewis as his tutor at Magdalen. Tynan, who was not a believer, recounted in his diary occasions when Lewis befriended him as a student. During one crisis when Tynan was suicidal, he went to Lewis for counsel. Lewis reminded Tynan of how he had escaped certain death during a German bombing of his house in Birmingham, leading Tynan to write: "As I listened to him, my problems began to dwindle to their proper proportions; I had entered the room suicidal, and I left it exhilarated." Toward the end of his life Tynan found himself turning again and again to Lewis' books; at his funeral in 1980 the last person to speak was thirteen-year-old Roxana Tynan, who read three sentences from Lewis' great sermon, "The Weight of Glory":

The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself, they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

This is a most fitting conclusion to Jacobs' fine biography.

Don W. King is professor of English at Montreat College and editor of Christian Scholar's Review.

Copyright © 2006 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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