Calvin Academy of Life Long Learning The Real C.S. Lewis: His Life and Writings

Compiled by Paulo F. Ribeiro, MBA, PhD, PE, IEEE Fellow

Session VI Spring 2003, AD SB 101

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The Real C.S. Lewis: His Life and Writings

Schedule 3/13/ - Surprised by Joy: The Chronology and Development of a Tough And Holistic Christian Mind 3/20 - Mere Christianity: Orthodoxy and Basic Christian Doctrines (Other books: Reflections on the Psalms and Miracles) 3/27 - Screwtape Letters: Hell and Heaven 4/3 - God in the Dock: Common Sense Christian Practice 4/10 – Narnia: Imagination For Kingdom’s Service 4/24- The Last Ten Years: Shawdowlands (BBC Movie)

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Shawdowlands - Themes

Pain and God's Power

"Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all of the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform." (The Problem of Pain)

Pain and God's Goodness

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." (The Problem of Pain)

Grief and Faith

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." (A Grief Observed)

The Shadowlands

"The world is like a picture with a golden background, and we the figures in the picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold." (The Problem of Pain) 3

"For a good wife contains so many persons in herself. What was H. not to me? She was my daughter and my mother, my pupil and my teacher, my subject and my sovereign; and always, holding all these in solution, my trusty comrade, friend, shipmate fellow-soldier. My mistress; but at the same time all that any man friend (and I have good ones) has ever been to me. Perhaps more. If we had never fallen in love we should have none the less been always together, and created a scandal.“

CS Lewis 4

How Hollywood Reinvented C. S. Lewis in the film "Shadowlands."

by John G. West, Jr.

It is understandable why the film Shadowlands (now available on videotape) won rave reviews from almost everybody. The acting is splendid, the script is literate, and the production design is first-rate. All things considered, the film is a wonderful piece of cinema and well worth seeing. For those of us who never had the rare privilege of meeting C. S. Lewis in person, Shadowlands brings Lewis and his world to life in a new way.

Nevertheless, despite its beauty and its pathos, Shadowlands is not without major failings in the realm of accuracy. Unfortunately, many people seem to take at face value the film's opening claim that "this is a true story." The reviewer for Christianity Today, for instance, wrote that although "the filmmakers have taken some liberties with facts…and simplified some of Lewis's complex musings… the film is generally true to Lewis's life." As a matter of fact, it isn't. The names of the principal characters are the same, but much of the plot has been contrived to fit the point of view of scriptwriter William Nicholson.

I'm not complaining about the numerous small inaccuracies. I expected those. After all, it doesn't really matter that Joy had two sons instead of one (though it might matter if you were the son who was left out). Nor does it really matter that the marriage between Joy and Jack went on a lot longer than the film indicates (more than three years in reality). Such errors are minor and certainly fall within the domain of legitimate dramatic license. What is more difficult to accept are the two huge errors on which the whole plot seems to hinge.

The first of these errors is the depiction of Lewis's life before he met Joy. The film portrays Lewis as leading a cloistered existence in which he avoided women, children, and --above all-- commitments to any relationship or situation that offered him the potential for risk or pain. This depiction of Lewis is a convenient way to set up him up for the film's subsequent love story. But the portrayal invents a C. S. Lewis who never existed. 5

Contrary to the storyline of the film, Lewis had lived a life that was anything but cloistered or free from pain or commitment. During World War I, the supposedly cloistered Lewis served in the trenches in France, where he was wounded in action. After the war, the supposedly sexless Lewis apparently became infatuated with Mrs. Moore, a widow old enough to be his mother. When the affair ended and Lewis became a Christian, Lewis the uncommitted somehow felt obliged to support Mrs. Moore for the rest of her life, and she lived with Lewis and his brother until she had to be moved to a rest home (where he visited her every day). Meanwhile, the Lewis who did not associate with children had three children come and stay with him during World War II (they had been sent out of London because of the air raids (just like Peter, Edmund, Susan, and Lucy in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe). Similarly, the Lewis who supposedly avoided women also developed a close friendship with English poetess Ruth Pitter; he even told a friend that were he the kind of man to get married, he would marry her! And the Lewis who walked through life without painful experiences had to deal with his rejection by Oxford's academic community, which never saw fit to select this brilliant scholar for a professorship (Cambridge finally did in the 1950s). The second huge error of the film is its suggestion that Lewis's faith in God was undermined by Joy's death. While the film shows grief-torn Lewis saying (quite tentatively) to his stepson that he still believes in heaven, there is little indication in the film that Lewis still believes in a loving God. Indeed, in an outburst before his friends, Lewis is shown railing at the brutality of a God who acts as cosmic vivisectionist. Although this scene is invented (Lewisís grief was intensely private), the speech against God that William Nicholson puts in Lewis's mouth is actually inspired from a passage in Lewis's A Grief Observed. The problem is that Nicholson is slipshod in the thoughts he chooses to lift from Lewis: He appropriates Lewis's struggles from A Grief Observed but doesn't bother to give any sense of the reaffirmation of faith found in the rest of that book -- or in the many other letters, interviews, and articles by Lewis during the rest of his life. It seems that Mr. Nicholson wasn't interested in portraying an orthodox Christian who experienced intense grief and yet maintained both his faith and his intellect. Here is where the pernicious aspect of Shadowlands becomes evident. Lewis's writings -- including his intimate confessions in A Grief Observed --were largely efforts to vindicate God's often unfathomable ways to man. Lewis sought to remove the obstacles that separate us from a living relationship with the One who truly loves us. Shadowlands does precisely the opposite by setting up Lewis's faith as a straw man and then proceeding to knock it down. 6

The film repeatedly shows Lewis delivering a simplistic speech about how God uses painful experiences to make us listen to Him. The facile confidence with which Lewis delivers the speech is gradually contrasted with personal hell he goes through during Joy's sickness and eventual death. By the end of the film, Lewis has presumably recognized that his simplistic theological dogmas won't wash. He doesn't find God in suffering; he finds a silent void. Thus is the most cogent defender of Christian orthodoxy of the twentieth century transformed into a modern champion of anguished doubt.

I tend to think that most people who view Shadowlands will overlook the underlying contempt the film displays for Lewis's faith because Lewis is portrayed so sympathetically. And make no mistake: Despite the biographical inaccuracies mentioned above, Lewis is portrayed sympathetically. This film is not anti-Lewis. But perhaps that is because the villain in this story is not Lewis, but God. The great irony of Shadowlands is that it even as it draws people closer to Lewis, it may drive them further away from the One in whom Lewis found the meaning of life. What a tragedy it would be if those who see the film come away thinking that Lewis's earlier faith was somehow refuted by reality. Mind you, I am not claiming that this will be the result of Shadowlands. One can only speculate about the effect of the film on individual viewers, and this sort of speculation is rather dubious anyway. I can only suggest that given the film's script that some viewers may conclude that Lewis's defense of Christianity could not stand the scrutiny of real life. There is another possibility, of course: The film may inspire those who see it to read Lewis's writings for themselves and discover the reality of the faith to which he pointed. I hope that this second possibility will turn out to be the reality. 7

Review: Shadowlands - by Andrew Rilstone

I forget how much of my news you and your mother know. It is wonderful. Last year I married, at her bedside in hospital, a woman who seemed to be dying: so you can imagine it was a sad wedding. But Aslan has done great things for us, and she is now walking about again, showing the doctors how wrong they were and making us very happy....

C.S Lewis: Letters to Children I'd been building up to Shadowlands with some trepidation. Richard Attenborough has made a career out of sentimentalising the lives of well known historical figures. (Don't you think that Ghandi would have been improved if we'd been allowed to hear about what he liked to do with naked women...?) The thought of him getting to work on one of my personal heroes was not an inspiring prospect. The Hollywoodized publicity campaign didn't make me very hopeful. 'He thought that magic only existed in books.... then he met her.' Oh dear. So I was relieved to find that what we had was a pretty good movie, with Hopkins almost managing to be convincing as Lewis although he looked nothing like him, and Deborah Winger pulling off a very nearly perfect Joy Gresham. When you've read practically every that's been written about a pair of people, you get a very fixed idea of what they were like, and its impressive when actors manage to personify that idea. And the visuals, full of mists and sunrises and scenery and churches and crowds of undergraduates could hardly have been better. In fact if Mr Attenborough hadn't removed the point of the story and twisted its meaning, I would be in a position to recommend it. Shadowlands, in its three versions—TV, stage and now screen—is unashamedly a work of a hagiography rather than biography. It is selective about what it tells us about Lewis. The TV version didn't mention that C.S Lewis's brother, Warren, was an alcoholic, or that Joy Gresham's American abrasiveness made her very unpopular with Lewis's friends. Both of these were incorporated into the stage play, improving it enormously. Other awkward themes were ignored. We learned nothing of Lewis's alleged sado-masochism, nothing of his quarrel with Tolkien, and nothing of the mysterious Mrs Moore, who may or may not have been the lover of this 'confirmed bachelor'.. Nevertheless, it seemed to me to be a valid account of this part of Lewis's life: partial, yes, somewhat idealised, yes, but capturing some of the spirit of the man (or at any rate, that part of it which we know from his books.) Douglas Gresham (Lewis's stepson) told Lewis's biographer A.N Wilson 'how authentic it all felt, apart from the fact that so many of the details were untrue.' 8

Bill Nicholson, playwright of all three versions, said that in some biographies you have to work quite hard to find the patterns, the connections that can make the facts of someone's life into a story. In C.S Lewis's case, he found the work done already. Certainly, it seems as if Lewis was forced, at the end of his life, to live out a parable of everything that he had ever written— about Christianity, about children, about love, about death, about suffering. Doubtless over-simplistic biographies have made it all seem more clear cut than it actually was, but the bare bones of the story seem to be entirely true. A crusty old bachelor has a purely platonic friendship with an outrageous American; he enters into a marriage of convenience so she can stay in the country; she turns out to be suffering from cancer; their friendship turns into sexual love; there is a death-bed marriage, a three year remission: they are happy, she dies. Alone again, the Christian scholar has to re-assess everything he ever believed. Is there a more painful book in the English language than A Grief Observed, Lewis's diary of the month's following Joy's death? It has been said that in those months he lost his faith: what actually happened seems to have been rather worse. In the TV version of Shadowlands, Nicholson has him say 'I still believe in God, but what kind of God?'. His beliefs still seemed intellectually valid to him: but he doubted that God was good, or feared that a truly good God might be more dreadful, more terrifying than a malevolent deity. He rebuilt his faith, and his final books (Prayer: Letters to Malcolm and The Great Divorce) are probably his best: less smug, more considered, more pious, more concerned with searching for the truth, less with winning the argument. The BBC's play concentrated on what might be termed this theological plot. Despite its omissions, it was full of convincing, pointed scenes. We are shown that David and Douglas Gresham were the same ages that Lewis and his brother were when their mother died. We see Douglas reading the passage from the Magicians Nephew about Aslan bringing the magic apple back from Narnia to save a mother's life; and Lewis realising the absurd naiveté of the stories he had been feeding children. The play shows us Lewis's loss of faith—overstates it, according to some who knew Lewis—but culminates with his mystical experience, quoted directly from A Grief Observed—in which he realises that God is still there, unchanged.

The stage version improved the characterisation of Joy Gresham—we could finally see why Lewis's friends at Oxford might have disliked her. It incorporated a series of long monologues from Lewis, derived from the Problem of Pain, about the nature of suffering in the world. It removed David Gresham from the story altogether (ostensibly for reasons of dramatic economy, but one wonders if this was at the request of the adult David, who seems not to have shared his brother's hero-worship of Lewis.) It foolishly spends a lot of the second act on a series of rather inept tableaux of Joy and Jack being happily married, and incorporates their 'honeymoon' in Greece. Not good theatrical material, I'm afraid. It also made a lot more of the psychological element, arguing that Lewis was a screwed up kid, who never got over the death of his mother, and had been emotionally frozen by the experience.

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The film manages to cut much of what was interesting in the two plays. Warren Lewis's alcoholism is touched on, but to nothing like the extent that it was in the stage play. Strangely, the off-stage character of Bill Gresham (Joy's first husband) is whitewashed. In both plays, we are told that he used to fire loaded guns to work off his anger, and once broke a bottle over Douglas head. On the screen, Douglas briefly complains that his dad shouts too much. Viewers who are not very familiar with Lewis's life and work are likely to miss entirely the symbolism of the attic, so nicely brought out on the TV. Lewis's emotional coldness since his mother's death is reduced to a single conversation between him and Joy. His antipathy to women vanishes altogether: the common room bore who explains that men have the intellect where women have souls (and is demolished by Joy) is expressing a view that Lewis himself might well have put forward. 'Why on earth marry a woman' he was supposed to have said 'All the topics of conversation would be used up in a fortnight.' But Lewis the (very chivalrous) misogynist wouldn't fit Shadowlands according to Attenborough, so out it goes. But the films greatest sin is the way in which Attenborough marginalises all the specifically Christian ideas in the story. We lose a conversation between Lewis and his friends about the meaning of Christmas, and gain an explanation of the symbolism of the Wardrobe. (Is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe really the only Lewis book that anyone has heard of?) Later, he asks another bachelor friend if he feels a sense of waste. 'Of course.' replies the friend, and the scene ends. In the play, he was allowed to add 'I don't have your faith in divine recycling.' To be fare, we keep the Problem of Pain monologue from the stage play, which presents something not a million miles from what Lewis's beliefs actually were. 'I'm not sure God particularly wants us to be happy . . .Pain is God's megaphone for shouting at a callous world.' He says that we all long to take each others pain on ourselves but does not add, as the real Lewis undoubtedly would have done, that we can't do so, whereas God can, and did.

These are fairly trivial points. The loss of Joy's account of her conversion from communism to Christianity, and Lewis's account of his own conversion from paganism seems more serious. A longish talk drawn directly from the couple's correspondence becomes a single gag about them both being 'lapsed atheists'. A very nice scene, created specially for the film, in which the embarrassed Lewis shares a bed with Joy for the first time, has him commenting that each night he kneels at the end of the bed and says his prayers. 'Like a little boy' comments Joy. Lewis might have said that as a little boy he was a humanistic atheist with leanings towards paganism and the occult. He doesn't. The film makes his Christianity something childlike and Anglican, which it wasn't.

Most seriously of all, the meaning of Joy's remission is changed beyond all recognition. In the two plays, the clergyman, having pronounced them man and wife and stumbled touchingly over expressions like 'in sickness and in health' and ''till death do you part' says 'I thought I might say a brief prayer of healing. Would you object if I laid hands on you?' This happened in real life: Lewis wrote in 1959— 10

I have stood by the beside of a woman whose thigh bone was eaten through with cancer and who had thriving colonies of the disease in many other bones as well...The doctors predicted a few months of life: the nurses, who often know better, a few weeks. A good man laid hands on her and prayed. A year later the patient was walking (uphill, too, though rough woodland) and the man who took the last X-ray photos was saying 'These bones are as solid as rock. It's miraculous.' Lewis believed that Joy's remission was a miraculous act of God. In stage and TV, as in life, this was the point of the story. In the movie, no prayer-of-healing is given by the clergyman, and we jump straight from the wedding to scenes of Joy undergoing chemotherapy. The chemotherapy replaces the prayer. Attenborough could hardly have put it more strongly than that. True, we hear Lewis's own parish priest saying that he knows how hard he has been praying. However the film has Lewis say that he does not pray to change God, but for the effect it has on him. This would not have been the real Lewis's view. I don't say that Attenborough, who is not, I think, a Christian, should have turned the movie into a piece of religious evangelism. You may not believe that Joy's remission was miraculous. Peter Bide, the clergyman in question, doubted that it was. What is important is that Lewis thought so. If Attenborough was worried about the film turning into a piece of polemic, he could have introduce a sensible atheist for Lewis to talk to. He could have had Lewis meet Bertrand Russel or A.J Ayer, who were both around at the right time. He could have re-staged the famous debate about miracles in which G.E.M Anscombe ripped holes in Lewis's argument, to the extent that he never wrote another book of theological argument. But instead, he simply shunts any specifically Christian,—or Lewisian—God off to the sidelines. I didn't see Chaplin. Maybe they played down the fact that he was a comedian.

I could go on, and on. TV left Joy's final moments to our imagination; screen shows it to us. In real life, Lewis reports Joy's last words were 'I am at peace with God'. The screen gives us 'You have to let go, Jack.' TV let us hear the dreadful, poignant conversation that Lewis reports in A Grief Observed ('If it is allowed, will you come to me when I too am on my deathbed?' 'Allowed? Heaven would have a job to stop me, and as for Hell, I'd smash it to pieces.') Film cuts it.

As in all previous versions of the story, we end with Lewis talking to Douglas Gresham, and the old man and the little boy crying together. Lewis, on this view, was emotionally frozen, and, in particular, couldn't bare to show emotion in front of other men. Hence, in the play, being able to embrace his stepson and weep was the culmination of a process which started when he met Joy. Douglas is represented as being in the same position that Lewis was in at his age: not believing in heaven, but wanting his mother back. It is an extraordinarily affecting scene. In the play, it pulled the two themes of the story—Lewis's childhood, Lewis's faith— together. In the film, it loses its point (though not its emotional punch) since the themes of motherhood and Christianity have been so played down. It is no big thing for Lewis to hug Douglas when we have already seen him kissing him goodnight; no big thing for him to cry when we have already seen him do so. And no big thing for him to say 'I believe in heaven' when we haven't been shown any significant loss of faith. 11

So what are we left with? A film about a man who wrote children's books (and little else, apparently) and gave lectures to old ladies; who married late and lost but was pleased he had done so. It has genuinely moving moments: the death bed marriage; Jack and Douglas crying in the attic; Jack haranguing the priest. Genuinely moving moments: but do they carry their power because of my memories of other, better version and of my reading of the works of the man himself? I don't know.

I wouldn't want to dissuade anyone from seeing what is in the final analysis a good movie: Hopkins really is phenomenal, particularly given some of the lines he has to work with. But I do hope that the BBC take the opportunity to repeat the original: and that when audiences have put their hankies away they read A Grief Observed, maybe the best Christian book written this century.

Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was left behind In ashes, yet with hope that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on her Easter Day.

C.S Lewis, 'Epitaph for Helen Joy Davidman' 12

He took in more, he felt more, he remember more, he invented more … His writings record an intense awareness, a vigorous reaction, a taking of the world into his heart … His blacks and whites of good and evil and his ecstasies and miseries were the tokens of a capacity for experience beyond our scope.

Austin Farrer on C.S. Lewis 13

There was one candle on the coffin as it was carried out into the churchyard. It seemed not only appropriate but also a symbol of the man and his integrity and absoluteness and his faith that the flame burned so steadily, even in an open air, and seemed so bright, even in the bright sun.

Peter Bayley at Lewis’s funeral 14