C. S. Lewis as a Literary Scholar and Critic
[an essay of 5000 words for a projected Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis]

The Cambridge Companions to practically everything must be one of the most successful series sponsored by any university press. They are works of haute vulgarization meant to appeal to a readership considerably broader than those who peruse tomes on such topics as Asyndectic Parataxis in the Lesser Ambigua of Maximus the Confessor, the once standard fare of academic presses.

The editors of the Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis are two learned Anglican priests, Michael Ward and Robert MacSwain. I have never met Ward, but I knew MacSwain years ago when he was a seminarian at the Princeton Theological Seminary. There turns out to be another fortuitous connection, of sorts. After spending many years in Britain, MacSwain has returned to the United States and indeed to my alma mater, the University of the South, where he is taking up a professorial appointment in the School of Theology.

As for C. S. Lewis, the acquaintance is much older. I well remember that in my Rhodes Scholarship interview in New Orleans in 1958 I confidently outlined my hope to go to Oxford in order to study under Lewis. I thought a couple of the interviewers gave me an odd look—the meaning of which I belatedly grasped only when I arrived in England the next autumn to discover that Lewis had moved to Cambridge a couple of years earlier. Oh, well.

I nonetheless studied with him after a fashion. My doctoral dissertation dealt with the illuminated manuscripts of the Old French Roman de la Rose, also the topic of my first published book (1969). At that time the long chapter on Roman de la Rose in Lewis’s famous Allegory of Love was the most authoritative essay on the poem.

There really are at least three C. S. Lewises. There is Lewis the famous writer of children’s fantasy and science fiction. There is Lewis the inspiration of fundamentalist Christians. (This Lewis is just slightly ironic, given the fact that the man was in actuality a moderate Anglican and anything but a biblical literalist.) But what Lewis did in his “day job” was read, teach, and write about medieval and Renaissance literature. He was a don—which in British academic lingo means a university teacher, not a Mafia chief—a fact that perhaps explains why all photographs of him make him seem insufferably donnish [as above]. The man wrote like an angel—make than an archangel—and reading his complete critical writings in preparing my essay was an exhilarating experience. What seems to be an afterthought to most Lewisians (his achievement as scholar and critic) seems to me absolutely central to everything else he did and wrote.

Scholarly presses are leisurely, and the editors are dealing with a couple of dozen contributors. Still, my essay was finished long ago; and I am guessing the volume should appear in 2011.

Back to Recent Writing