Yet another critic takes a quick run at understanding C.S. Lewis in the New Yorker…
The two Lewises — the British bleeding don and the complacent American saint — do a kind of battle in the imagination of those who care as much about Narnia as they do about its author. Is Narnia a place of Christian faith or a place to get away from it? As one reads the enormous literature on Lewis’s life and thought — there are at least five biographies, and now a complete, three-volume set of his letters — the picture that emerges is of a very odd kind of fantasist and a very odd kind of Christian. The hidden truth that his faith was really of a fable-first kind kept his writing forever in tension between his desire to imagine and his responsibility to dogmatize. His works are a record of a restless, intelligent man, pacing a cell of his own invention and staring through the barred windows at the stars beyond. That the door was open all the time, and that he held the key in his pocket, was something he discovered only at the end.
Gee, it must be nice to be that certain of what was going on inside somebody else’s head.
…Not sure I agree with more than half of what’s said, or implied in here, about my old master. But an interesting read nonetheless.
