C. S. Lewis – A Life by Alister McGrath

Author:Alister McGrath
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / General, BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Religious
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Published: 2013-02-28T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

* * *

1945–1954

A Prophet without Honour?: Postwar Tensions and Problems

By 1945, Lewis was famous. In the British academic world, a scholar’s status is calibrated by several measures, including the number and perceived significance of publications. The ultimate mark of distinction for any scholar in the humanities is to be elected a fellow of the British Academy. Lewis achieved this honour in July 1955. Yet in the eyes of his biographers, this important mark of academic acknowledgement has been totally overshadowed by the recognition of a very different audience.

C. S. Lewis—Superstar

On 8 September 1947, Lewis appeared on the front cover of Time magazine, which declared this “best-selling author,” who was also “the most popular lecturer in [Oxford] University,” to be “one of the most influential spokesmen for Christianity in the English-speaking world.” Screwtape had taken England and America by storm. (America, it must be recalled, had not heard Lewis’s broadcast talks on the BBC.) The opening paragraph helps capture the tone of the piece: a quirky and slightly weird Oxford academic—“a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice”—unexpectedly hits the big time.524 Were there more bestsellers on the way? Time cautioned its excited readers that they would just have to wait: “He has no immediate plans for further ‘popular’ books, fantastic or theological.”

The Time article of 1947 can be seen as a tipping point—both signaling Lewis’s arrival on the broader cultural scene, and extending his reach by drawing wider attention to his works. Yet Lewis was ill equipped, organisationally and temperamentally, to deal with his rise to fame that began in 1942. His high profile led to both adulation and invective being poured on him, and his private life—which Lewis had hitherto protected—began to come into the public domain. He became the subject of discussion in British newspapers, which often portrayed him in unrecognisable terms. Tolkien was particularly amused by one media reference to an “Ascetic Mr. Lewis.” This bore no relation to the Lewis he knew. That very morning, Tolkien had told his son that Lewis had “put away three pints in a very short session.” Tolkien had cut down on his own drinking, as it was Lent—a time of self-denial for many Christians. But not, Tolkien grumbled, for Lewis.525

Lewis was now inundated with letters from devotees and critics, demanding his immediate and full answers to questions great, trivial, and downright improper. Like a gallant knight of old, Warnie came to his brother’s rescue. From 1943, he typed replies to his brother’s burgeoning correspondence with two fingers on his battered Royal typewriter, often without consulting Lewis about their content. Warnie later estimated that he typed twelve thousand such letters. Warnie also devised an imaginative technique for getting rid of the increasing number of self-important people who demanded to speak to Lewis at home personally by telephone.526 As Tolkien recalled, Warnie’s method was to “lift the receiver and say ‘Oxford Sewage Disposal Unit,’ and go on repeating it until they went away.”527 Yet Lewis’s growing fame

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