Dorothy and Jack by Gina Dalfonzo

Author:Gina Dalfonzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christian Living;Dorothy Leigh Sayers (1893–1957—Religion);Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957—Friends and associates);Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963—Religion);C. S. Lewis (1898–1963—Friends and associates);REL013000;BIO018000;REL012070
ISBN: 9781493424382
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

“A Rather Frightened Bachelor”

Both Jack and Dorothy, then, believed that gender was not the most important thing that had to be taken into consideration about a person. And yet it still mattered more to him than it did to her. As much as he made exceptions for individuals, a lot of those generalizations were more deeply ingrained in him than he knew.

This was why, for instance, he could lay so much stress on the difficulties of friendship between the sexes in a book like The Four Loves, even after having enjoyed the friendship of women for much of his adult life. Characteristically, in that book he focused on the problems arising when well-educated men tried to be friends with not-so-well-educated women—and treated it as a generalization, something common to most groups of men and women. Most of his descriptions of ideal friendship had to do with male friendship; he professed such a great ignorance of female friendship that he felt unable to say anything about it. As for male-female friendships, he acknowledged that they could arise when men and women worked in the same profession, but treated them as something rare and difficult to come by.

Of course, having gotten to know him, Dorothy could hardly help but be aware of his attitude—quite possibly more so than he was. In December 1955, she wrote to Barbara Reynolds, who’d had a chance to get acquainted with Lewis when he attended a meeting at her house.

I’m glad you got hold of Lewis. . . . I like him very much, and always find him stimulating and amusing. One just has to accept the fact that there is a complete blank in his mind where women are concerned. Charles Williams and his other married friends used to sit round him at Oxford and tell him so, but there really isn’t anything to be done about it. He is not hostile, and he does his best, and actually, for a person with his limitations I think he didn’t do too badly with the Lady in Perelandra. What he suffers from chiefly, I think, is too much Romantic Literature, far too much Milton, and, as you can see from Surprised by Joy, a life bounded by school, the army, and the older universities. . . . He is probably frightened at bottom, like most of these superior males, and, like Milton, is capable of being clumsy and even vulgar—a thing you never find in Dante or Charles Williams, however eccentric or exaggerated their ideas about the sexes.42

Regarding Dorothy’s use of the word vulgar, Dr. Crystal Downing, codirector of the Marion E. Wade Center, suggests, “It seems to me that she invokes it in its original Latin sense of ‘common’ (as in ‘The Vulgate’). So when Milton and Lewis are vulgar about women, they are reflecting the ‘common’ attitudes of their eras.”43 This is probably much the same definition of the word that Lewis was using when he complained of vulgarity in her essay for the Charles Williams book.

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