He's Not Nice, But He Is Good

You Wouldn't Be Friends With C.S. Lewis

There are many serious misunderstandings about the life and life’s work of Clive Staples Lewis, but thankfully I am here to alert you all.

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I'm concerned that some of us are under the misapprehension that we would have just loved C.S. Lewis if only we, too, could have haunted the hallowed halls of Oxford while he and his cronies rolled around like a tweedy academic crew of roadmen. This is unfortunate, but I totally get it. I want to believe, too, that I could hang with Jack. Every writer who is aware of the Inklings’ existence has probably yearned to set their personal time machine for the 1940s and read chapters of their period romance novel or whatever to the assortment of literary cronies ensconced at the Eagle and Child.¹ Whom among us of even marginally bookish inclination has not dreamed of afternoons buried in the stacks of a library whose halls stretch back to medieval antiquity as drizzle rattles against the diamond-paned windows. How often have we finished up our imaginary day’s studies and found ourselves strolling down to “the local,” happening across various hallowed names of Oxford’s midcentury pantheon in the street as we go? It’s only natural that we wish for even a single chance to drift into that storied corner room, to hear a booming voice kindly exclaim “Why don’t you join us! I say, aren’t you working away at something too? Go on, get it out, we’re all just waiting for someone to read something!”

And yet, our beautiful daydream has a few problems. First off, the Inklings met in the morning, not at twilight. The second, deeper issue is this: although I have come to truly love the man since meeting him in the back corner of a used bookstore at the edge of Albuquerque…I’m not actually sure I would have liked Clive Staples Lewis all that much.²

And neither would you. Yes you, all you nice normal people reading this right now. How can I say this about the mascot of Very Nice Christians everywhere? Well, I promise it's nothing to do with you; you seem nice enough. It's Jack that’s the trouble. Where should we begin?

Let's start with personality issues. Before he accepted Christ, Lewis strikes me as the picture-perfect image of the Reddit Atheist, a blustering, preening, intellectually vain pomposity concealing a scared Sensitive Young Man beneath his brittle shell. He ridiculed the faith of his best friend, persisted in a show of Anglican conformity to avoid confrontation with his father, and through it all maintained a distinct attitude of superiority over pretty much everyone. A (legendarily reluctant) conversion experience in his thirties didn’t suddenly overwrite this personality anymore than it does for anyone else. Instead, Lewis just began the work that would last him for the rest of his life: painstakingly submitting himself to the process of the Holy Spirit’s sanctification.

And that kinda went just ok, if we’re honest. Jack remained something of an Acquired Taste throughout his adult life. Arrogant, loud, self-assured, and snobbish weren’t just accusations lobbed at Jack by students who couldn’t appreciate His Whole Schtick. They were self-assessments from Lewis’ own remarkably honest letters. Lewis fought frequent and enthusiastic conversational duels with his dearest friends, nevermind his (many) enemies. He seemed to be the kind of guy who would happily and boisterously dominate the conversation in most rooms just because he'd gotten started and liked where his own train of thought was going.

But you see you have trod on my loud pedal by mistake.

~ A representative apology from Lewis upon realizing that he had devoted most of a letter to sustained diatribe on one of his very many Favorite Subjects.

Yes, conversation was Lewis’ primary mode of friendship. But those conversations weren’t free from friendly fire. Lewis and his great friend Owen Barfield took to calling their long exchange of letters vociferously debating Anthroposophy “The Great War,” and the verbal shelling continued until they called a mutual cease-fire to preserve the relationship. Oh yes, we all want to go back because we think we would have been immediately accepted into the circle (we wouldn’t, they were pretty picky about their friends actually). But even if we were brought into the ring, we might not have the stomach for what happened when the bell rung. Patricia, can you really handle one of your beta readers rolling around in the booth and shouting “Not another f****** elf?!” Bruised egos and hurt feelings were kinda the stock in trade here.

Jack seemed to positively like the sort of conversational conflict that most of us in this current era of soft feelings and softer voices reserve for catastrophic, relationship-ending blowouts. Lewis felt this brought out the best in his friends and himself, exposed their thoughts where they could be argued over and sharpened. And, just incidentally, allowed him to exercise his personal enjoyment of being the room’s combined ringmaster, jester, and schoolmaster. Not for nothing was one of Jack’s favorite books Boswell’s Life of Johnson, a biography of a large and jolly Brit of whom it was said: “There is no arguing with Johnson; for when his pistol misses fire, he knocks you down with the butt end of it.” Sound familiar? Inklings meetings were many things, but they weren’t very what you might call Nice.

C.S.L. was highly flown, but we were also in good fettle; while O.B. is the only man who can tackle C.S.L. making him define everything and interrupting his most dogmatic pronouncements with subtle distinguo’s. The result was a most amusing and highly contentious evening, on which (had an outsider eavesdropped) he would have thought it a meeting of fell enemies hurling deadly insults before drawing their guns. Warnie was in excellent majoral form. On one occasion when the audience had flatly refused to hear Jack discourse on and define ‘Chance’, Jack said: ‘Very well, some other time, but if you die tonight you’ll be cut off knowing a great deal less about Chance than you might have.’ Warnie: ‘That only illustrates what I’ve always said: every cloud has a silver lining.’

~ J.R.R. Tolkien in a letter to his son Christopher from 1944 illuminating a cozy Inklings evening.

This habit of full contact conversation carried over into his work with students at Oxford as well. Students seemed to respect or loathe Lewis but he was nobody’s beaming avuncular uncle. He had been forged in the fearsome verbal skirmishing ground of W.T. Kirkpatrick’s³ bitterly logical one-on-one tutorials, and apparently carried the method into his rooms at Magdalen College. Lewis expected much out of his students, didn’t particularly enjoy critiquing their essays, and refused to treat them as anything other than professional colleagues in the deadly important battle against Ignorance. This resulted in a slew of hilarious anecdotes from students who found their professor to be slightly unimpressive, a bit perplexing, and (dare we say it) a bit Weird compared to his (already growing) reputation.

At the end of an hour with Lewis I always felt a complete ignoramus.

~ Anthony Curtis on his fond memories of his tutor

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I don't mean this in a wrong way; he wasn't friendly. He once said to a student, ‘I'm not your schoolmaster.’ He regarded a student as being an adult and therefore looking after one's self.

~ Dick Lucas, the same

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[Lewis] conceived the role [of teacher], not as that of manager, still less as authoritative Doktorvater, but rather as that of disputant, like his own Kirkpatrick. The disputations might be designed…to force clearer formulation or self-defense or discovery of hidden assumptions. What, for example, did I think thinking was? ‘How often, Fowler, do you suppose yourself to be actually thinking?’ I was about to claim, absurdly, that I spent most of my waking life thinking, when he broke in to confess that he himself thought only about once a week – twice, in a good week.

When one graduate pupil brought a poor essay, Lewis is said to have torn it silently into the wastebasket. A devastatingly impersonal learning experience. Lewis didn’t always know when he hurt.

He would sometimes in the middle of a supervision go off to the next room and pee into a chamber pot, apologizing for his ‘weak bladder’ and maintaining the flow of discourse through the open door.

~ Alastair Fowler on the homey pleasures of a session with C.S.L.

Of course, a lot of this has less to do with Lewis the man and can be directly traceable to Oxford the institution or even just midcentury culture in Britain and elsewhere. I grant you the point. But a pattern absolutely emerges across the public and private writing of this, undoubtedly, great man. He seemed to spend his whole life wrestling an inner circus of pride, selfishness and self-seriousness to the ground, and putting on something like a mask of good humor and conviviality every day. It is beyond my judgement or yours to say how much of this public persona was aspirational and how much was really Jack’s best nature gradually revealing itself as the Holy Spirit hacked away the encasing flesh. But I’m confident enough in his closest friends, who seemed to think it was something of both.⁴

So yes, of course Patricia, Jack Lewis was a deeply kind man. Far be it from me to sully a lifetime of charity, thoughtfulness and genuine love for others. Didn’t he help that one sweet lady that he definitely never had a strange relationship with?⁵ Wasn’t he known for bringing out the very best in his students, as long as they stayed survived his opening salvo? Didn’t his secret benevolence keep him financially pinched and his attendance to the needs of other people harry his time? I celebrate each one of these things, and they make the man even more precious to our memory.

I just don’t want us to forget what it cost him.

A good man (who wasn’t nice) might suffer his foolish pupils calmly because he thought it was his duty to do so. He might spend three decades serving the increasingly irascible whims of a surrogate mother as she gradually declined, setting aside time and again his own pressing work, even at the risk of losing the respect of his closest friends. He might go to elaborate lengths to create an anonymized charity trust which liquidated the majority of his considerable royalties on the needs of others, while he himself never escaped money troubles for long. He might live a life marked by Duty as a polestar virtue. The kind of man who could leave even the most tolerant of friends deeply wounded by verbal jousts might conceivably also bend his literary skills to an enduring explanation of Christian love, if only for his own personal reference.

It is very different for the nasty people – the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn, in double quick time, that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following-or else despair. They are the lost sheep; He came specially to find them.

~ From Mere Christianity, in (to this author) a somewhat obvious and poignant self-insert from Lewis

Jack Lewis wasn't a great man despite his faults. He was driven to be a good man through his faults. He found the only possible way to overcome them was through daily personal submission to Christ. When we avoid the weakest sides of our greatest saints, we are choosing to ignore the very thing that made them great in the first place. The central struggle of every human life, the choice to remain as we are at our most vile and weak and evil or to choose the agonizing climb to holiness, calls to each of us just as it called to Jack. His public image of a jolly and unflappable chaotic good literary hedge wizard shouldn’t fool us.

The entire point I’m trying to make here isn’t just one long screed insisting that C.S. Lewis was an awkward, uncomfortable person to be around sometimes. Because even though he wasn’t always a nice man, he was absolutely according to Christian standards a good man. We are afraid of admitting the difference because in our hearts, we know that the possibility of our goodness carries immense spiritual responsibility. “No Christian is perfect” is a tragedy, not a promise from Jesus. And if Lewis’ life teaches us anything, it is that real striving towards the mark of the upward call of God doesn’t always look like we might think. In fact, many times it looks like swallowing who we really are and allowing God to beat us into the shape we were meant to be.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who has imagined what it will be like to finally meet Jack in paradise, I presume after I have spent my first million years doing more important things and need a short break. I always imagined his mansion will be more of a pleasantly crumbling country house where I’ll find him pottering around the front garden or something. I’ll recognize him immediately because you know glorified mind and everything, but also because he’ll look just like I always imagined. And he’ll relight that battered straight apple pipe of his and for a minute everything will smell like Bell’s Three Nuns and he’ll grin owlishly at me out of the smoke like a portly balding angel. And I won’t be able to say anything, because I’ll want to say thank you and ask him questions but I’m too busy frying in the heat of glory shimmering off that face. And he’ll just smile probably, and beckon me over to a puddle in the pebbled path (I’m pretty sure that aesthetically pleasing rain happens in heaven) and show me that my own face looks just like his.

“All this time, you thought it was me? Dear boy, look at us. Anything we ever wanted in our whole lives came from Him.”

And I’ll probably cry for a minute and then maybe he’ll let me read him some chapters from a very middling novel.

1. A.K.A. “The Bird and Baby,” A.K.A. the Oxford pub where they had a regular corner to drink morning beers while discussing their works-in-progress. As one does.

2. Shouts out to Title Wave, gone but not forgotten.

3. A.K.A. “The Great Knock,” presumably because of his habit of verbally beating the bullcrap out of self-assured teenaged males.

4. Read a biography or two, I can’t be expected to source everything. This isn’t a dissertation, it’s a diatribe.

5. Don’t look it up, no worries, there was definitely for sure nothing else going on there before Lewis’ conversion. It’s all good. Moving on.