Abstract
The editors of this volume have assembled a rich and varied collection of essays and memoirs delivered over the course of the last 30 years to the Oxford C. S. Lewis Society. The Society gathered around Lewis and the Inklings, discussing those figures and the intellectual and imaginative culture those figures created and inhabited. Like its namesake, the Society is one of ‘serious discussion of ideas … lively conversation, wit, laughter, and a vibrant sense that literature, faith, and daily life might be deeply entwined’ (p. ix).
The book is divided into two parts: essays and memoirs. The first part explores Lewis’s theology, philosophy and literary studies. Michael Piret’s essay on W. H. Auden’s place among the Inklings and Tom Shippey’s essay on Lewis’s antagonistic relationship to Oxford’s English faculty deepen our picture of Lewis. The section of memoirs gives us interesting accounts of Lewis by people who knew him. Peter Bide’s essay on marrying Lewis and Joy Davidman is especially delightful, offering a fuller picture of that controversial moment in Lewis’s life.
For all of its delights, we should not mistake this as a book of ground-breaking scholarship. It isn’t. Many of the essays are 20–30 years old. People who are already familiar with Lewis will be hard pressed to find anything in this collection that they didn’t already know, apart from the occasional titbit of biographical or archival interest. There are exceptions to this, however, as noted above.
This is not critical scholarship either. Critiques of Lewis are few and far between. Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of Miracles and Rowan Williams’s appreciative critique of That Hideous Strength are the only genuinely critical essays in the collection. Vociferous critics of Lewis like A. N. Wilson are roundly and repeatedly dismissed. The absence of strong critique is a bit odd given Michael Ward’s chronicle of the Society as having invited antagonistic speakers like Philip Pullman (or a bold fellow who suggested Lewis was in hell!). Including some of those critics in the collection would certainly have rounded out the picture of Lewis’s ‘circle’ – especially considering how Lewis himself would not have shied away from debate.
Without that kind of riposte, the collection is rather one-sided. But that brings me to the purpose of this book. This collection was not intended as a work of critical scholarship. But then what is it? I suggest that the term best suited for this collection is ‘celebration.’ It is a celebration of that intellectual and imaginative world that Lewis and his friends created. Even the essays in this collection that break little new ground are a joy to read because they draw the reader further into that world.
Lewis once said that one of his great joys was a group of friends, talking and laughing in front of the fire. Though the fire in Lewis’s Oxford rooms went out decades ago, in the pages of this collection, a new fire is lit, pipes are packed with new tobacco, and the laughter and delight echoes off the walls again. If such delight was the intent of the collection, then it is marvellously successful.